**TRAINING: PAIN TOLERANCE** — If you struggle with painful thoughts and ideas, the answer is not to confront the biggest, craziest, most painful thing possible, but to gradually increase your tolerance for difficult intellectual ideas. **Methods that work**: - Slightly greater athletic performance once fatigue kicks in - The ability to continue working effectively once tired - Regularly soliciting criticism from more skilled people in your profession **Why it works**: The ability to persist through endurance training when it starts to hurt does seem to generalize to the ability to push through on difficult intellectual work. Talking yourself into completing a little more work when truly tired makes you realize the body and mind have excess resources and capacity. Pain becomes less terrifying and dreadful — still unpleasant, but mundane instead of dreadful. **The criticism paradox**: Criticism from credible people who care about you is nearly universally valuable. By regularly soliciting and implementing it, the experience actually goes from painful to pleasurable over time — seeing flaws and weaknesses eventually becomes joyful, since you know you'll correct them and improve. --- **Source**: [[Pragma]] by Sebastian Marshall — Danger Flags #2: Overlooking. Synthesized from [[Danger Flags 2 - Overlooking]].