Introspection

The reality is that there’s a lot in my life (and in most people’s lives) that they get very good at not looking at. It’s also easy to justify not looking at many things - it could be clearly negative, destroy relationships, kill motivation, etc. Going in with eyes open is easily said, but could have huge consequences.

Ways to Learn About Your Mind

I could think of this as a categorization of interventions - I’ve actually been looking for a resource like this. Before I rush ahead, I’ll list some of my self awareness techniques:

Free Writing
Time Tracking
Focus Tracking
Meditation
Reading about psychology & reflecting on personal thoughts / experience in its light
Values Experiments

It’s fascinating that paying attention to behavior my say things about what you believe and want - I think that it mostly says something about your mind, and what it wants - the addictive feedback loop of social proof and gossip style delight. The notification system.

I actually think that with their suggestions they’re intentionally giving themselves the freedom to have silly hypotheses. So sarcastic too.

From my techniques, it looks like I prefer (1), (3), (4), and direct introspection.

They have a few questions at the end - Which methods do I use? Why do I use them? Would it help to add some? Are there ways that they missed?

It would be an awesome task to generate experiments that work along the 9 methods given, and send Geoff or someone else a comprehensive list of experiments. For each experiment, a writeup with results would be really helpful.

There are also almost certainly categories that were missed. But for myself, I’d love to have that list.

Source: Original Google Doc