Don't put me on a pedestal or anything; my so called "years of experience" cover my first decade of adulthood, basically being "a loser" or at least not developing a lot of potentially good opportunities.

It's only in the last three months or so that I've found this approach, which is PJ Eby's work.

I don't know what to say about it - I could (edit: will!) write a lot about it, but since I'm so new to it it might not be accurate or present it well, but I'll try and summarize, and I can link you to some more good stuff (see below).

Anyway, the main bits are an overview of how humans learn behaviour: we animals have brains to model the world around us and predict when situations are going to be good or bad for our survival. Those parts of our brain signal using feelings - we get alert and nervous at a sharp twig snap, spooked when all the noises around us suddenly stop, pleasant anticipation for friends showing up, anger at enemies showing up, etc. That signalling happens whether a situation is happening or if we just imagine it happening.

Along the way in our normal lives we accidentally learn a lot of these {situation -> feeling} links which are unhelpful or tied to really dumb / irrelevant things, and they guide our behaviour too.

Things like: once upon a time if we were shunned by the group we would starve to death, so being shunned by people generally is a bad thing. We might bring a drawing to show and tell and the teacher makes a comment and the class laughs. Some people might get a dislike of show and tell, or being watched, others a dislike of drawing, others a dislike of feeling proud of their work, others a dislike of being good at something. (Or you might be fine with it).

Now having a dislike of show and tell probably wont affect your life much, but if you get: doing work that you feel proud of makes you feel bad (because your brain is predicting people will shun you), you're going to have lingering problems for a long time.

And the worst bit is, we have two problems on top of this. Westerners/western males shun emotions as being childish or girly, and humans have self conciousness which isn't always privy to the causes of our feelings and makes up "logical" explanations like "I don't want to be proud of my work because pride is a sin".

This is one big difference between people who say "I don't see what all the fuss is about, starting a club is easy - ask people - just do it" and people who can't "just do it" because the very idea of asking people makes them feel bad.

This sets the stage for the next bit: a kind of meditative/imagination skill to learn to get from "I don't want to be proud in my work because it's a sin" back down to "if I feel pride in my work people will shun me".

After that, he teaches various techniques to break that kind of learned link, or delve into it further or whatever. I don't want to go into that because I don't yet know them well, there isn't space to do justice and text isn't great for it, I don't feel right to give away his source of income from teaching it.

But I do want to direct you to this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/21r/pain_and_gain_motivation/1uz6?co...

Read it as it turns into a discussion between PJ Eby and ChronoDAS, and follow the link to carry on the thread.

Also http://lesswrong.com/lw/21r/pain_and_gain_motivation/1v0a

And where I say it isn't difficult because of effort, it's a simple act but difficult because it's mind twisting, note this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/1vyj

Anyway, that's the kind of thing I was working from when parroting the parent post back. Seen in this light, reading "recently I've just found out using tables to layout pages is a bad thing" takes on a different meaning. Yes it's a bad thing, but that doesn't mean you need to feel bad. and taken in the context of the rest of his post it smacks of

"using tables is bad therefore I'm a bad programmer therefore I'm not worthy of a real programming job and people I look up to won't respect me now I feel shit :("

whereas someone else might get

"using tables is bad, but I'm proud of my site anyway because it helps people swap textbooks. Any real programmer would respect my ability to compromise".

Realising that you could feel that way is hard. It's hard because we think with our brains, and we've just found a bug in our brains, so our thinking isn't trustworthy on that matter, and we get: "I couldn't feel good about using tables. I could pretend to feel good but deep down I know tables are bad so I would have to feel bad at some level".

If you spent your life believing 1>2 then someone told you it was wrong, and convinced you, you'd get to a stage where you thought "ok, I could believe that 1<2 .. but then I'd be wrong because 1>2. So all I can do is lie and pretend but I wont really believe it because I know 1>2".

From the outside you can see that if you did change to "1<2", you would believe it and it would be real and not a lie or a pretense.

Anyway, PJ Eby spent a couple of years trying to summarize his work into a book and couldn't because of this very problem - you think in a particular way and if you aren't getting the right information from one piece of writing then you wont get it right and you wont know how or why, it might take interactive guidance.

You might be able to get his half-finished book by signing up to the email list at http://dirtsimple.org/

Anyway anyway, what's great about this approach is that his methods are based on methods which work repeatably, and tests you can do that you can prove to yourself that it's working. If you do one of the methods, then imagine the situation again and still feel bad in the same way then it hasn't worked. In that sense it's basically scientific - there's no chanting over crystals of copper sulphite to transmute lead into gold, only methods which repeatably and testably get useful results. Which is why I draw a distinction between this approach and the ra-ra useless fluff and the approaches which work sometimes on some people even if they do include some woo.

PS: I feel a bit of a jerk writing this post. It's long, waffly, preachy, proselytizing, I fear the more respectable HN community disliking me for it (I would have emailed you directly if you had a profile address), and you rolling your eyes at me for it. These are all bugs in my thinking holding me back from doing things that I want to fix at some point. Also, sorry for talking about you as if you weren't here, Meric.