Key Instruments of Personal Development [Article | Longread]

Introduction

In this article I want to share some conclusions taken from my life experience as well as some useful books.
I consider this information useful to increase the level of ones' intelligence.


What is intelligence?

"The ability of the mind to come to correct conclusions about what is true or real, and about how to solve problems."
An abstract term. Lets break this down a bit:
"The quality of the psyche, consisting of the ability to adapt to new situations, the ability to learn and memorize on the basis of experience, understanding and applying abstract concepts and using ones' knowledge to manage the environment. General ability to know and solve difficulties, which unites all cognitive abilities:
sensation, perception, memory, representation, thinking, imagination, and also attention, will, and reflection."

As it seems from reading various articles about human brain, physiologically, an intellect consists of various groups of links between brain neurons,
which on their side consist of other combinations of links, responsible for all types of different reactions and construction of logical patterns and heuristics.
Since this is still a broad definition, we should outline some specific categories of skills, mastering which would allow us to increase the amount and strength
of those links (which is somewhat a measure of intellect):



Mindfulness

"The psychological process of bringing one's attention to experiences occurring in the present moment."

Why is it important?

When you are aware of everything what's happening around - you receive more information for analysis.
When you are analizing attentively - you are more precise in your conclusions.
External irritants are becoming less involved in your cognitive processes once you concentrate.
These factors are greatly influential on your perception of reality and quality of interaction with it.

Practical methods of increasing the level of your mindfulness:

1) Meditation.
You are constantly busy with something. Whatever you do while awake - this is sort of a work (even if you might not consider so, your organism does).
Doings with high energy costs (like physical work or brainwork) often urge you to get distracted. This seems kind of natural - if you are not hungry
and there's no threat to your life at the moment - body just wants to stay idle (those are just my assumptions, but I find it logical from biological point of view).
The point here is that things you're considering as recreational are still not entirely so. Yes, they might consume less energy in contrast to the real work, but still are qualified as "work" by your body.

As far as I understand, the only possible rest is a good sleep. All other things are "doings". And those can be classified for "beneficial" and "useless" relatively to your stated goals.
The distraction habit I mentioned, obviously, interferes with goals achievement by keeping your attention away.

Meditation in the context of this article is first of all a practice to eliminate distraction habit.
It also has some other beneficial influence, but here I'd like to point out:

a) Relaxation.
The more you are relaxed physically - the more energy you save. Getting less tired.
The more you are relaxed mentally - the easier is to concentrate on particular thoughts
stream without switching to other topics chaotically and getting less stress.

b) Attention concentration.
Sometimes this is wrongly associated with some mental tension. However, this is not quite true.
Such tension occurs when there are some nasty thoughts which you are making an effort to get rid of.
Regular meditation practice helps to eliminate such thoughts and makes your concentration less costly.
Description of a simple meditation practice could be found here.

2) Introspection and watchfulness.
Use your mindfulness. Make a habit to notice nasty thoughts and moments of emotional reactions.
Ask yourself questions. Try to find reasons of your thoughts and actions. Make notes of your observations about your own behavior.
That material will help you with further self-analysis. If you make it seriously, you'll be able to predict your own behavior and
regulate your reactions. This will help you to model various situations more precisely.
You can find more info about this practice here.

Watchfulness uses your attention, hence it is a real practice of training your ability to keep and manipulate attention.
Moreover, you will analyze the information you obtain, which directly helps to discover causation between phenomena.
While you are relatively idle (i.e. public transport, traffic jam, just having a walk - in any situations which doesn't require
to use your attention for something particular), just start to pay attention to people, their clothes details, any objects around.
From my personal experience this appeared to be an effective method to raise awareness.
Just need to recall about this practice in suitable moments.


Rationality

Wikipedia term is way too abstract, so I will take one from E. Yudkovsky:

"1. Epistemic rationality: systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs to reality by adjusting them based on the evidence obtained,
checking why you think the way you think regarding any fact, phenomenon, action, or your beliefs, as well as avoiding cognitive biases.

2. Instrumental rationality: systematically achieving your values.
More precisely - the art of application specific actions to obtain the desired result."

Benefit of such processes seems obvious, but mastering these skills is not as simple as it might seem.
There are multiple sciences which study different aspects of rationality, like cognitive psychology, decision theory and their common denominator,
probability theory. Altogether, they describe those rationality processes way more detailed, thus showing important patterns and percepption
bugs, knowing which can influence on efficiency of your actions.

I'd rather not claim I've mastered rationality methods well. Some of them require a lot of time and conscious efforts to master for practical use.
But I can list some areas of knowledge that I learned relatively well, and can apply in my reasoning (if there is a suitable context).

• What is a cognitive bias and how to avoid it.
  
• Difference between cognitive biases and ordinary mistakes or fallacies.
  
• How does human intelligence work (roughly).
  
• How to have a reasoned discussion.
  
• How to evaluate arguments, facts and evidence in a discussion.
  
• How to shift beliefs if they require adjustment to get closer to reality.
  
• What are inferential distances and to evaluate them.
  
• How to distinguish discussion about a term or definition from the real subject of discussion and why is it important.
  
• How evolution works and how it differs from the modelling that human intelligence is capable of.
  

There's a lot more to be learned for sure.
Here I recommend to read following books to upgrade your rationality skills:

1. Daniel Khaneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
The ground of cognitive psychology and decision theory.
Book contains a lot of experiments described in details and shows some really unexpected conclusions about human behavior.

2. Eliezer Yudkovsky "Rationality: From AI to Zombies".
Fundamental work on rationality. I have to confess - I wasn't able to finish it reading. However, I read a half of it at least 3 times.
It is indeed hard to read it sometimes. But I took most of my rationality knowledge from it. (By the way, he quotes book #1 here.)
This book is very big (2393 pages). And free. You can read it online here or download from their official source by following provided instructions.

3. Yuval Noah Harari "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind".
This book can replace a world history course. It is indirectly related to rationality, but more importantly it just allows to see things from a different perspective,
thus helping to develop more reasoning models. Highly recommend.

4. Eliezer Yudkovsky "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality".
Don't get confused with its name nor with the fact that's a fanfic. It's an absolute must read. This book actually took me straight to rationality study.
You'll probably need to google some terms and references while reading this book. I personally read this book 3 times, and will return to it again.
It is free as well. Read here or download here.



Time management and self-organization

Having multiple tasks or projects always needs to be managed in some way. If you really want to complete them.

I can hardly imagine all my tasks for projects to be kept in the head simultaneously.
The most obvious solution is to write them down, structure it and put deadlines.
I personally use Excel file with multiple pages to keep track of all my things.

There is a couple of very comprehensive books about time management by David Allen - "Getting Things Done"
and a short summary of it "Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life".
Detailed description of GTD system is better to read explicitly from these books, but I'd like to point out some key practices from it:

Organizer

Make yourself an organizer if you don't have it yet. Yes, it might be inconvenient at the start, but it's just a matter of habit.
It will take you a while to come up with proper categorization of your tasks and interface.
I personally find Excel files flexible enough to make both categorizing and interface convenient.
I divide my file for schedule, projects, regular tasks, education, thinking, health, social interactions and time accounting pages.
Yours may be different, but the concept here is to keep track of as many things as possible. NOT to keep all tasks in the head!
It's even hard to recall for me, how does it feel when you don't have an organizer. There would be just total mess in my head.

Bucket

This is your place for notes. Every new idea, important thought or new task gets written here.
This can be your note app on smartphone, text file on PC, Excel file or whatever is always nearby and can serve the same purpose.
Literaly write down everything you might ever consider you need to recall.
The next step will be sorting this bucket weekly. Classify everything from this bucket into appropriate categories
of your organizer or note files. To a place where you will work further on those items.


Time accounting

I've mentioned time accounting page in my organizer. And there's a very good reason for it.
If you are keeping track of how much time do you spend on anything you do, it will keep you aware where actually it goes.
Interestingly enough, you actually don't know how much time do you spend on certain things before that.
Yes, some things like 9 to 5 job schedules can be counted easily, but I'm talking about your personal time,
the part you dedicate for your own projects and rest. You might get surprised to see how much time you actually procrastinate.
But even if you don't procrastinate a lot, this is still useful in terms of being able to figure our what changes in your schedule you should perform.
This is also tangled with mindfulness practice. Make a habit to write down the time when you are starting to do something.
Work on project, play game, go for a walk or whatever. Then write down the time when you finish.

You might feel that all this organization is limiting you. It may seem inconvenient and create psychological tension.
You can reason that you don't need it and it is enough for you to keep things in the head, that you are wasting your
time writing everything down and maintaining your organizer.
This is normal situation when you are leaving your comfort zone. Say "Goodbye" and move forward.
After some time you'll see that was just a rationalization of your laziness and your wish to keep the comfort zone unchanged.


Environment

The people who surround you, especially those whom you regularly communicate with, have quite a strong influence on you.
In particular - on your behavior, direction of thoughts and, over time, beliefs. Of course, this influence is much stronger in
childhood, when your self-awareness is just beginning to emerge. However, this influence continues at a later age as well.
Environment responds your actions, sets certain rules of behavior and imposes various compromise.

I suppose if you take a candid retrospective look at your past experience of social interactions, you can discover quite a lot of signs
of such an impact and actual changes that had already happened. Indeed, many changes are harmless. Afterall, we all subconsciously adopt
some behavior patterns by social interactions. However, there are some clearly harmful things which are better to avoid. And as well,
there are some positive thing which you might consider valuable relatively to your goals.

I came up with a simple conclusion:
If environment doesn't intrude aggressively into the process of achieving your goals - you can manage your perception to decrease negative emotions
if there are any. Otherwise you should perform changes to reach the opposite effect (eliminate the impact of environment or at least minimize it).
If your goals are aligned with the people around - you simply will not feel any need of change. And respectively, the opposite is valid.
Of course, there are many small annoying things, but they are not critical if they don't affect reaching the goal.

So how is all this related to intelligence increase practices?

Since there is positive correlation between environment and activities you do, formation of your thinking vector and beliefs,
it is clear that you should pick an appropriate environment in order to achieve better results in your cognitive enhancement.
This means you have to be aware of how your environment actually impacts you. This means you should learn how to track certain
changes from particular reasons. Try to look on this question from multiple perspectives. Take this environmental factor
seriously when you evaluate your progress. This can be a thing which slows you down. Or you can make it your acceleration factor.



Conclusion

There might be more possible areas which help you to develop your cognitive abilities. I'm looking forward to discover them for myself
and once I do, I will surely update my article. But even now, things I've mentioned here can help you significantly once you start practicing them.

This article took me a while to complete and I've changed myself a lot since I started to write it.
I hope it will help you as well.

Constructive critics is appreciated.

Thank you for reading!