Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

I've spent thousands on dance instruction from hip-hop to salsa to ballroom.

In my opinion, if you have confidence on the dance floor -that will make you look pretty good because confidence is attractive. It takes courage to dance in public, especially freestyle.

When you have possess skill in tandem with confidence to put yourself out there, that is what makes awesome dancers. For hip-hop, that means hitting the off beats. Skill + Confidence.

Many of the best dancers I know have that combination. Dancing. It's not about looks. It's not solely moves. It's about being with the moment. It's about owning the floor.

    When you take dancing lessons, you learn steps and
    you learn steps and you learn steps. It can go on 
    for a long time. And then one day, you just learn 
    to dance, and it is so different.                 

    - Bill Austin

They're kind of rare, but I've seen very confident people on the dance floor who were simply awful. I mean really, really, embarrassingly bad. Trainwreck bad.

They were definitely in no way attractive. And you kind of wished they'd had no confidence at all. But there they were, like an atomic bomb going off in the middle of the dance floor, making Austin Powers look timid.

I'm jealous of these people. I hope to be that fearless some day.

I learned a long time ago that you can't learn that kind of fearlessness. You can gain confidence, become more comfortable in social situations, but you will never have a certain level of fearlessness that some people exhibit.

Do you have references concerning this ?

Not a reference, per se, but the intriguing diary of a guy who talked to a new stranger for thirty days in a row.

http://socialskydivingwithjustin.posterous.com

In light of this I like your choice of username.

Right, but how do you measure "confidence" or "owning the floor"?

Subjective peer ratings. Plus if you were to go to any given club, you can usually tell who has it, on the dance floor.

Not everything can be measured. There is a reason why there are no accurate algorithms to detect the beat (most rely on tapping a keyboard or pad) - it's complex and simple at the same time.

I think that the article implies that subjective confidence levels may be tied to objective testosterone levels, which seems completely reasonable to me.

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