Social Skydiving Days 18-20: Winners are Made of Fail

Glad to see this is getting a good response. This is a rough draft of a personal experience essay I wrote for my English class. It's got plenty of flaws and was scary to publish in such an imperfect form but in my mind it's the most important post I've written.

Thanks again for reading guys.

I love the "Winners are made of fail, losers of excuses" point. It really is true that if you don't fail and always come up with excuses, you'll never win.

Really great to see you honestly blogging about your life.

I've never been too socially anxious, so I wouldn't have felt this article — while inspiring — was very pertinent to me. It has a more general message though: if you feel anxious, the only route to recovery is by passing through it.

I'm currently living in a foreign country making due with limited language skills and my experiences learning to use the language in a real situation mirror this Social Skydiving experiment. You have to find the fun in failure.

This is a very nice story around on very important point: being nice and friendly creates tremendous positive externalities, and if people don't react well, that's their own problem, not yours

This reminds me of the book "The Game" By Strauss. Setting aside the obvious objectionable intentions (getting laid) of the pick up artists in that book, alot of what those guys do is about turning social stituations into hacking projects. That may sound creepy, but for a lot of people, learning how to socialise successfully is an important thing. Check it out.

Hey there Justin,

That's some of the best personal history stuff I've ever read on the internet.

You should seriously consider a writing career, you've got talent to spare. Thank you for all the insights in your life. My gf who has serious anxieties about meeting strangers is eating up your writings as soon as a new episode is posted, and thank you again on her behalf.

j

"She mentioned that she still wanted to go over and watch the band but she stayed put. I took a stab at failure and left her alone with the other guy at the bar"

The author did a good job and it worked out well! But in this scenario (where it is likely she's interested), be confident, stand up from your barstool, nod your head toward the band, and ask her to join you with a smile!

Otherwise you run the risk of letting her think that you aren't interested. And, confidence is kinda sexy ;-)

Without failure, there is no success.

Thanks for the insightful story and sharing your experiences. I'm hoping it provides me the fuel to take a few more risks in social settings than I typically do.

This was a really good read. I had (thankfully!) almost forgotten how crippling social anxiety can be.