If I understand you correctly the purpose isn't the journal itself (using stickers and pretty stationary aside), but it affords inducing a kind of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: where one is primed to notice moments of joy in their day? But unlike the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon or Frequency Illusion which is unintentional - the idea is to actively and intentionally habituate it.

In the same way, and I'm wildly speculating here, that a jeweler begins to "notice" qualities in gemstones over time? A jeweler, say looking for faults in diamonds, over time will just twist it in a certain way, and intuitively "know" what to look for.

I'm clearly missing something here, do you mind over-explaining it to me?

The idea is that it trains you to pay attention to, and remember to savor, positive events in your life, which in turn will improve your overall enjoyment.

But that is limited by the things which genuinely produce an above-baseline level of joy, then how does that train me to do anything since I already need to be in the habit of noticing them otherwise they don't get journaled? And what if I know I should be grateful for getting paid today, but I don't feel joy about it - if my genuine feeling is "I should get more" - how does that factor in? Surely the person who feels they deserve more is the exact kind of person who needs to journal gratitude because they aren't having enough gratitude - but if you're not meant to journal things which you intellectually know should or are supposed to be grateful for, but don't earnestly feel it - then how does this work?

And what if on a given day, nothing brings me joy, It's a really "some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed" kind of day? Again, surely those are the days where a gratitude is paramount - to somehow reframe the day?

I know I'm missing something here, or maybe there's some implicit assumptions I'm bringing which are warping my understanding.

maybe the reason you didn't see any improvement beyond the edification of your self-image as a person who does awesome things no one does because you didn't do the awesome thing (i.e. keeping a gratitude journal) correctly?

The reason say this is I don't understand how a Gratitude Journal works. I feel like it is absurdly easy to quota fill a journal every day with things I am supposed to be grateful for, even if I'm (and I hope I'm not) an entitled and spoiled brat who feels like the world somehow feels the world owes me more than I've received.

"I'm grateful that I have eyes, I saw a caution sign and avoided tripping and injuring myself, some people are blind, have diminished vision. They may not have seen the sign. I'm grateful for the vision I have."

"I broke my favourite mug today, I'm grateful that I had a favourite mug at all and got to enjoy it for the two months I had it, and further grateful that I'm not so destitute that I can't afford to replace it"

It seems like it's very easy to come up with these things, especially if you're allowed to repeat them day after day. But how does that process help?

Being a person who does awesome things that no one else does is only effective when you do awesome things correctly. I don't know - maybe you were doing it correctly. 

I struggle to write cover letters for applications^[1], despite being self-aware. The obvious remedy would be to lie and make up what skills or abilities I have based on the application, and hope there's no negative repercussions later. I see my difficulty in writing cover letters as part of a wider pattern of being unable to answer the question "what am I good at - that people need enough to pay for?" which is a fundamentally different to the questions "what am I proud of?" and "what are my passions?". Writing a cover letter involves not only identifying the tasks which are easy or hard for you and skills you possess; but then ranking those against a theoretical sample of others - such as the pool of other applicants you're competing with. How accurate you can rank yourself improves your cover-letter writing and general application strategy.

You can be really good at calling out the title of a Tin Pan Alley song from someone just playing a few bars, but who's (realistically) going to need that so much they will pay you regularly for it?

Why did I mention passions: there is a common sentiment that you should follow your "passion" and find a career in that, rather than do something "for the money" and end up hating your job and your life. I personally think following your passion over money is bad advice, but I feel like if I don't mention "passions" someone will in the replies.

Some people are really passionate about Taylor Swift's music, like they might be able to talk breathlessly about her discography and the enumerate minute differences between (Taylor's version) and the first recordings. But there's probably a glut of supply for those skills making it virtually impossible to monetize.

If we change the question entirely to "what should I upskill in?", this certainly opens up new possibilities, so much so, that the breadth of possibilities leads to analysis paralysis. It might be easier/wiser to instead ask "what must I not upskill in?" and shrink the possibilities based on some principled "whys?" and reasoning.
 

1. ^{^}

   Jobs, grants, proposals, even lead generation as a freelancer - anything where you need to "sell yourself"

You forgot the seemingly platitudinous but actually important one: how it makes you feel. 

I'm not kidding. Something that makes you feel exposed or overcompensating can and will affect your posture, your body language, which will attenuate the "impress" factor of your choice of outfit on the audience. This extends beyond wrong sizing, or fabric: I'm talking about the effect of self-consciousness about an outfit (which is a high probability if you're going outside of your comfort zone, and wearing something "to impress") affects your physicality.

But also, what do you mean by "impress"? I assume you mean a certain degree of ostentation? Does "dress to impress" always imply a relative "overdressing" for the occasion, i.e. more formal but ostentatious relative to the baseline of how everyone else in the setting will be dressing?

Speaking from recent experience, yet it is. I tried it this month, missed a day, tapped out at the annoyingly close 27 posts (with the aforementioned day's lag). If you work a full 9-5 or have other extracurricular responsibilities, writing more than 1 vomit draft a day will be very difficult.
 

Said simply, when someone has their bottom line written, you should think about whether the argument they’re presenting is more or less convincing than you’d expect on priors. If its more, update in favor of them. If its less, update against.

Does this apply for people who don't have a bottom-line written first? I'm thinking about, say, how I like hearing the opinions of people who view modern art, but have no art history or formal art education: I like hearing their naive judgements - now if they argue why a artwork is good that I find convincing, is this analogous to hearing a salesman who obviously has their bottom-line written first why this supplement or food product is good for, I dunno, sleep, and making a surprisingly bad or good argument in favour of that?

In both cases: the naive judge of art, the salesperson -- I have a certain expectation about how convincing they will be.

Actually, I tend to expect television salespersons will not be convincing. I find the type of arguments (or lack of argumentation) and rhetoric they deploy just don't work well with me. And I realize I'm in the minority. I expect their style works on the majority of television viewers.

then anything they wrote (or said) above the bottom line is worthless toward determining whether the bottom line is true.

To be fair, i don't even know what their bottom line is - I only caught a vague sense that it had something to do with health. Not what specific benefits they were promising, nor how much they hedged those claims.

Reading this post today, I realized I don't actually know what the difference is between a belief and a model. I still don't.

Models, as I understand it, are comprised of assumptions about cause-effect relationships which are themselves beliefs. I'm thinking about decision making models - where these anticipated causal effects influence what conclusion (i.e. option) is reached by a model. So a model is basically are a cluster of beliefs. But that doesn't appear to be the idiomatically correct way to refer to both (I believe I am wrong in my usage/understanding).

Certainly in the post linked, beliefs are seen to be at odds with models. A model itself is not "believed". And I suspect some kind of internal, intuitive meta-model of self is drawing that conclusion, and producing that belief.

Does anybody here have any advice or thoughts on the "two list" approach?

I can't remember who it suggested it and I'm likely conflating different anecdotes - but the gist was you have two lists: a traditional to-do list which has tasks and actions; and a second list that I've seen described as a "to think" list - which might contain a series of problems or questions that are important but for which you are unable to progress.

In my case my "to think" or "problems" list would be as long as my arm, my to-do list would be filled obvious stuff: with whatever is the immediate next step on a project for a client, grocery lists, paying bills, booking tickets to a show etc. But on average shorter than the other list.

I'm not sure how to convert individual items from the the longer non-actionable list, into actionable things to do.