90% of Your Social Problems Can Be Solved by Meeting A Lot More People

Have you ever talked to someone who was losing weight and wanted fitness tips? It can be kind of stressful. They’ll swear that they’ve done everything they can to lose weight but nothing works.

But then you start to probe them. You ask them how often they work out, and it turns out they don’t even belong to a gym. You ask them what their diet is like, and it turns out that they spend about half of their week eating “cheat meals.”

For some reason, people expect success without having the faintest idea of what makes success actually happen: real exposure, real work, real action, all done on a consistent basis.

You’ll see this happening on these “social skills” type forums specifically. Guys might ask something like:

So, /r/GetSuave, I’m a young introvert who never held hands with a girl. I gave my number out like you said, and for some reason, this woman didn’t multiply, become 10 different women, and start chasing me! What gives? I’m doing everything right!

Or it might be something simpler, like this:

/r/GetSuave, how do I ask a woman out for the first time in a suave way?

You know what? The answer is, no matter how much advice we give you, you’ll probably still come across as a somewhat nervous dude. We can throw the book at you, but if you think knowledge alone is going to change your self-image, you’ve got some work to do.

What you really lack is experience.

Consider this:

• Do you think you’ll get better at chess without either practicing or playing a lot?
• Do you think you’ll add any muscle if you don’t lift any weights on a regular basis?
• Do you think you’ll get better at archery by reading about it online?

Then why is it any different with social skills and building a high-value, fun lifestyle?

It’s not.

Stop Waiting for Someone to Come in and Change Your Life For You

You might read about abundance mentality, but if you expect that one person, or one thing, or one event is going to change your life, you really don’t understand it yet.

There are generally two symptoms of this:

• You keep putting off action in favor of knowledge. Maybe you’re waiting for that latest GetSuave post. Maybe you’re waiting for that critical motivation quote that will change your life. Maybe you’re waiting for…anything. Guess what? It’s not coming. This is your life. You know that quote in Buddhism: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, cary water.” That’s how it is. This is life. This is it. You’re living it. When you’re 90 and on your death bed, it’s not going to be much different. Your mind will still be as present as it is now. It will still have fears, hopes, pains, joys, regrets, pride. This is all it’s ever going to be. No one’s ever going to fix it for you. There are people who love you and would if they could…but no one can. You have to. There’s never going to be a beautiful shining day where everything is different and all of the world’s challenges are easy for you. You can either do the work that you need to do to change your life right now, or you can’t. Either way, tomorrow will come. And when it does, you can either say proudly, “I worked really hard yesterday” or you can say “Maybe I’ll change…today.” Don’t be the person continually waiting.
• You keep waiting for one magical snowflake Love Of Your Life to show up and remove the need to become good at social skills. You know what you need?. Just as you have to give up the hope that life will ever be dramatically different from your daily experience today, you have to give up hope that life will be dramatically different because of one person being in it. Sure, there are some shy people who meet a great person, marry, and live happily ever after. I know many people like this. You know what finally helped them meet that person? They decided to get off their ass and do something about it, meet people, risk failure, and sacrifice.

Okay, rant over. This is /r/GetSuave, after all. We want to make this as easy and natural as possible - and make it work for you. So how can you get more painless experience?

Lesson One: It’s Okay to Fail

I think sometimes because you see James Bond and George Clooney in the banner for this sub, and we talk a lot about being chased by women and the like, that many guys assume that they have to be 100% smooth 100% of the time.

That’s simply not the case.

For starters, chill out. You’re more suave than you know simply because most other people don’t care that much about your failures. Because of the “grass is greener” effect, they’ll actually tend to weed out your failures when they think about you and only think about what they’re jealous of.

Next, I can’t understate the importance of handling failure in a smooth way. So critical. Success impresses people, sure, but you’ll never get the kind of adoring compliments you get when someone sees you fail and handle it with grace. I swear, people are more impressed with seeing someone handle failure gracefully. You want to be James Bond? Consider what it actually takes to be someone who’s smooth and poised even in the face of getting shot at, betrayed by beautiful women, and told off by villains, hotties, and bosses the world over. The only reason we think Bond is cool is because he shrugs it off, not because he’s 100% effective. And Bond is male fantasy. Even in our wildest fantasies, we’re not 100% effective. Consider that, for a moment.

You should be thrilled by the opportunities rejections and failures bring:

• The chance to build your confidence more than any success could
• The chance to build your failure-handling skills so you always feel smooth no matter what happens
• The opportunity to learn how to become internally-validated, not externally-validated
• Building up thick skin
• Building up a tolerance to social pressure

The list goes on and on. When you have a healthy view of failure, success won’t even look all that attractive as it once did. Failure is that useful.

Third, build up your ability to, as Churchill said, go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. You want to build frame. Winston Churchill just told you how in one sentence. “But I’ve failed 19 times, that’s so difficult and awful! Surely I’m the only person to have ever experienced failure!” Tell that to someone who’s failed 1,000 times without losing heart and then get back to me.

And ask yourself how badly you’re really going to feel if you keep seeing yourself fail but recover. You’ll start to develop the (accurate) notion that you’re strong. And that strength will come through in everything you do.

But you don’t get strong without the exercise.

Lesson Two: You Need to Get Out Regularly

Remember the fat person trying to lose weight from the beginning of this post? They were so confused about how they can read diet blogs all day and not lose weight. Except that their focus shouldn’t have been on diet blogs, it should have been on the action necessary to lose weight.

But action is hard, and GetSuave is about making life easier on yourself. I’m all for that. So let’s take Scott Adams’ advice on building systems rather than goals and design a system of a lifestyle that will get you meeting new people as a matter of habit.

• Talk to more people in the places you already go. The bus stop, the train station, a class, the coffee shop - as a matter of course, even the shyest among you are forced to socialize. It costs you nothing to optimize your experience in these places you already have to go. So make a commitment to talk to at least one new person there every time you’re venturing out.
• Go to at least one new place once per week. Ideally, you should be going out a lot more often than that, but if you’re a shut-in, one place is as good of any place to start. (If you’re already more advanced than this, do more.) Go to the most comfortable possible place for you - albeit a place where your goal is to talk to people - and enjoy. Don’t make success the goal; make going out and talking to people the goal. It doesn’t have to go smoothly.
• Create an event amongst your friends. You already have a social group; plan something! I can’t tell you how many missed opportunities I’ve had over the years because I failed to see that I could simply plan my own things, invite people, be the host, and have a ball. Create the kind of party you would want to go to. I didn’t write this post for my health, after all.
• Take your hobbies social. Sound familiar? If you want to kill two birds with one stone, then unwind from work and socialize at the same time. Not only will it make your life more interesting, but you’ll be forced to deal with other people. And that’s a good thing.
• Make a habit of being the mayor. You know Brent Smith’s advice of going around a room and having brief, positive interactions with everyone you see? Make a habit of it. No more slinking in the corner. Memorize an introductory line “Hi, I don’t think we’ve met, how’s it going,” rinse, and repeat.
• Volunteer at a place that forces you to meet people. Ever work at a soup kitchen? You’ll have about 100 short interactions in quick succession, you’ll do something good, and you’ll get used to talking to people you don’t know.

Over time, you should build up your tolerance to new people, new situations, and the flow of people into your life. And you should ramp it up. Go out more. Challenge yourself to go out alone. Start BIG parties. Plan big events. Ball out. You are, after all, the only one true source of fun in your life. You might as well take advantage of that fact.

Lesson Three: Get Creative

Some people here are already comfortable talking to a lot of people in quick succession. But we also have too many “I met a girl in a class” posts on this subreddit. It’s time to ramp it up and really make things interesting.

• Go to one social event per week where you feel totally out of your element. Maybe it’s a polo match with all the wealthy people. Maybe it’s a car show. Or a charity ball where you have to wear a black tie and secure an invitation somehow to get in. Maybe it’s the Opera/Symphony. Maybe it’s just a swanky hotel bar when you’re used to going to dives. Either way, you should get used to the kind of lifestyle where you might meet really interesting people - and in the process, become one yourself. Dress up, feel uncomfortable in your own skin, embrace the failure, and slowly get used to the idea of your evolving self-image.
• Throw a crazy party. Don’t rent a limo; charter a boat for an exclusive party. Don’t just have drinks at your place; serve champagne, buy a karaoke machine, throw out Twister and watch madness ensue. Do something that takes peoples’ lives out of the ordinary and be the catalyst for them having an amazing time, then see if experience is an issue for you anymore.
• Go overboard. Sign up for all the speed dating services you can in a week and find out just how much you can take. Do it as an experiment. See the difference in your interaction son Day 5 as opposed to Day 1. And see, once and for all, that you don’t really have to be scared of the opposite sex.
• Find an article like this and turn it into a checklist wherein you have to meet at least on person. At the end of 50, maybe you buy yourself that thing you’ve really wanted. The key? Make it fun. Make it a mission. And make the goal itself not to attract anyone, but to simply expose yourself to new experiences.

What Will Be Solved When You Build Experience

Why am I harping on this? Because look what naturally happens when you get more experience

• With more people in your life, you’ll naturally build your abundance mentality, because your abundance will in fact be true.
• With that natural abundance mentality comes a stronger frame and the ability to walk away from anyone who’s too negative / too much of a bother.
• With more experience under your belt, you’ll start to become poised and naturally relaxed in ordinary situations like talking to exceptional women.
• You’ll get over your fear of introducing yourself, opening up the skills to make meeting new people exponential.
• You’ll gradually change the type of people you hang out with, and will naturally run in social circles that are bigger and more active.
• You’ll learn how to unwind even when other people are around, making a social lifestyle more guaranteed.

TL;DR

• GetSuave is cool, but experience will always trump talk. Use this sub to help shape your actions and discover cool ways of building your lifestyle, not to replace the principle that action should trump talk.
• It’s okay to fail, and in fact learning how to handle failure is one of the most important and beneficial things you can do. And one of the most impressive.
• Turn your regular life into opportunities to talk to new people.
• Look for new places where you can go out and comfortably interact with people at least once per week.
• Give yourself a “mission” where the goal is not to succeed, but simply to get experience. Buy yourself a gift at the end of the mission as a reward.
• Expand beyond your horizons by starting to attend and throw extraordinary events. Don’t just get comfortable in your own skin, expand your skin.