This is awesome, thank you so much!  Green leaf indicates that you're new (or new alias) here?  Happy for LW! : )

"But how does Nemamel grow up to be Nemamel?  She was better than all her living competitors, there was nobody she could imitate to become that good.  There are no gods in dath ilan.  Then who does Nemamel look up to, to become herself?"

I first learned this lesson in my youth when, after climbing to the top of a leaderboard in a puzzle game I'd invested >2k hours into, I was surpassed so hard by my nemesis that I had to reflect on what I was doing.  Thing is, they didn't just surpass me and everybody else, but instead continued to break their own records several times over.

Slightly embarrassed by having congratulated myself for my merely-best performance, I had to ask "how does one become like that?"

My problem was that I'd always just been trying to get better than the people around me, whereas their target was the inanimate structure of the problem itself.  When I had broken a record, I said "finally!" and considered myself complete.  But when they did the same, they said "cool!", and then kept going.  The only way to defeat them, would be by not trying to defeat them, and instead focus on fighting the perceived limits of the game itself.

To some extent, I am what I am today, because I at one point aspired to be better than Aisi.

Two years ago, I didn't realize that 95% of my effort was aimed at answering what ultimately was other people's questions.  What happens when I learn to aim all my effort on questions purely arising from bottlenecks I notice in my own cognition?

When he knows that he must justify himself to others (who may or may not understand his reasoning), his brain's background-search is biased in favour of what-can-be-explained. For early thinkers, this bias tends to be good, because it prevents them from bullshitting themselves. But there comes a point where you've mostly learned not to bullshit yourself, and you're better off purely aiming your cognition based on what you yourself think you understand.

— from a comment critiquing why John still has to justify his research priorities to be funded

I hate how much time my brain (still) wastes on daydreaming and coming up with sentences optimized for impressing people online.  What happens if I instead can learn to align all my social-motivation-based behaviours to what someone would praise if they had all the mental & situational context I have, and who's harder to fool than myself?  Can my behaviour then be maximally aligned with [what I think is good], and [what I think is good] be maximally aligned with my best effort at figuring out what's good?

I hope so, and that's what Maria is currently helping me find out.