10 tips from a Silicon Valley bootcamp that aims to make smart, successful people more productive

Carlo Allegri/Reuters

The Center for Applied Rationality, a Silicon Valley non-profit, seeks to make already smart and successful people more productive through multi-day live-in workshops.

It's almost like rationality boot camp.

Here are some of the best tips I gathered from attending one: 

Be an agent, not an insect.

Agents use higher brain functions to control their actions and shape their emotional urges.

Insects just follow genetically determined programs, never seeking a better way or a more worthy goal.

Develop better habits.

Check Google maps to find a quicker route to work, and do a bit of research to determine if you can improve how you brush your teeth. Occasionally investigate whether you can better execute the tasks you repeatedly engage in.

Goal factor.

An undergraduate might desire good grades to get into a great law school, so she can work at a top law firm, so she might earn a high salary, which will supposedly win her a happy life.

While not acting inherently irrational, our goal-factored undergraduate should now realize that if happiness is her final objective she should learn more about what makes people happy.

Write down what you want (e.g. good grades), and then why you want what you want, and then why you want this. Keep drilling down until you find things you want just because you desire them. To win at life, you must find your brain's scoreboard.

Fight "ugh" fields with "next action" triggers.

Carlo Allegri/ReutersWhen your brain rebels at considering unpleasant activities such as doing your taxes or paying a parking ticket, you're confronting an "ugh" field—what the Center for Applied Rationality calls an inherent desire to "flinch away" from even thinking about a personal problem.

Counteract ugh fields with "next action" triggers—i.e. concentrate on getting all of your tax documents together rather than imagining everything you're going to have to do to complete your taxes. Similarly, an undergraduate filled with incapacitating dread at the thought of everything she has to accomplish to finish a class paper might find it much easier to just focus on her opening paragraph.

Align urges with goals.

A mom, greatly bothered that her undergraduate son rarely calls, complains to him when he does. This mom is negatively conditioning her son by linking nagging and phone conversations in his brain. To best achieve her goal the mom should instead make the phone calls as pleasant as possible. Workshop participants were advised to use positive conditioning on themselves.   

To achieve my health objectives I decided a while ago to do fifteen minutes of sprinting each week. Unfortunately, the emotional part of my brain didn't really want to do this, and after being good for a few months I stopped sprinting. Since the workshop I have started smiling whenever I think of sprinting in the hopes of convincing my brain that sprinting is fun. I want the urge to sprint. 

Gather emotional data on yourself.

What does it feel like when you are angry, panicked, or disgusted? Being in a negative emotional state diminishes your cognitive capacities including, ironically, the ability to detect whether you are in such a bad state. The first step to counteracting the ill-effects of these bad feelings is to become mindful of them.

Do this by trying to remembering the color, texture, or temperature (or whatever descriptive words apply) of these bad emotions and keeping track of your thought patterns and body posture when you're upset.

Fight "againstness" with empathy, gratitude, and understanding.  

Intense inter-personal conflict often activates the fight-or-flight mode in which our brain prioritizes short-term survival over long-term goals. Although this mode might have well served our cavemen ancestors when confronting hostile neighbors wielding sharp sticks, it poorly suits us when we argue with co-workers.

Fight-or-flight feelings can be counteracted by emotionally connecting with our adversary. So the next time someone gets angry at you, try to understand the basis for her hostility, feel sorry for her for being in such an unpleasant state, and be grateful that her anger is giving you a chance to practice your rationality skills. 

Win arguments by figuring out what winning would mean.

Carlo Allegri/ReutersWhen in a heated argument we often hope that our opponent will bow down before us to beg forgiveness and offer compensation. But since this isn't going to happen, a rational arguer, not in flight-or-flight mode, will think through what realistic outcomes he could achieve and then work towards them.

For example, if a good argument end state is for your co-worker to agree to not turn up the office thermostat, you should consider what you could offer this colleague to alter his behavior, a process requiring you to empathize with his goals. 

Test beliefs with anticipation.

Pretend you have developed a mental model of what your co-worker cares about. Test it by anticipating how he would behave if you offer to, say, buy doughnuts for the entire office if he agreed to stop raising the thermostat. And if your co-worker falsifies your prediction by stubbornly sticking to his intemperate demands, be grateful that he has contributed to your having a better understanding of him.

A willingness to change your mind is the absolute, number one, most important rationalist skill. Smart people can be particularly bad at updating beliefs because they often excel at justifying why they are right, even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Force yourself to at least consider the possibility of self-error.

Conduct a thought experiment in which you are told by a completely reliable source that you are mistaken, and then guess the cause of your blunder. This trick can work to get others to face possible miscalculations.

For example, if you don't trust your colleague's certitude that he will finish a project on time, ask him what he would estimate would be the most likely cause of delay if he were told by an omniscient genie that he will most definitely miss the deadline. To answer the question the co-worker must now focus his intelligence on finding reasons why he might be late rather than coming up with more justifications for why he is right and you have no cause for worry.

Earn CoZE points.

CoZE stands for Comfort Zone Expansion, and you earn a CoZE point when you do something that you fear but recognize isn't really dangerous. The agent in me might decide that I should be more social at parties by introducing myself to strangers, but the emotional part of my brain might hinder this goal by radiating fear of social rejection. 

You can desensitize fears by doing activities that lie a bit outside of your comfort zone in the direction of your goal. The Center for Applied Rationality had my boot camp cohort interact with strangers in an Oakland mall in unusual but nonthreatening ways. I handed a woman my cell phone and asked her to talk with my 8-year-old son, and I thrice tried, and twice succeeded, in giving sales clerks one dollar bills for free.

While CoZE activities seem silly, they might empower some shy computer programmer to fight through his social "ugh field" to pitch a software project to a prominent business person he recognizes on an elevator.

James D. Miller is an associate professor of economics at Smith College, the author of Singularity Rising, and the creator of a series of game theory YouTube videos. 

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