I play Go and chess, and I think of it this way: the best players may have won more than others, but they have also lost more than others, because they have simply played more games. Frequent loss or rejection is a necessary step to goodness. This also applies to business, the opposite sex, and most anything else that might matter to you.
Or, to paraphrase many an artist and CEO: if I have not failed today, it means I have not been ambitious enough.
I've played tournament chess for a few years. In fact, I'll be playing in a chess tournament this weekend. I've lost lot of games. The effect, I think, has been an increased ability to handle failure, rejection, and frustration in other areas of life. How one gets better at chess is a subject of intense interest among chess players. Of course, one has to learn opening principles, positional ideas, endgame technique, tactics, and more. However, I think there is also a psychological change that must happen. A transformation in how one views the game. Generally, I think it happens this way. A tournament player eventually realizes that the game is (most likely) a theoretical draw. Nobody can win a game by force. Every loss is the result of your own mistakes. Coming to that realization the chess player stops trying to force wins from unclear positions, stops mentally calculating long and wild variations that eat up time on the clock, and in truth will never appear on the board (and are full of errors anyway), and instead begins to focus on his opponents (perhaps subtle) errors. He begins to accumulate small advantages. In short, he lets the other player beat himself. Of course, it's all easier said than done.
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
Willingness to fail is a precondition for learning and growth.
I just finished Waitzkin's The Art of Learning, which discusses exactly that.
He makes the point that (IIRC) Michael Jordan made more last-minute, game-winning throws than anyone else on his team, but he also missed the most game-losing ones. He only excelled by overreaching.
I have a problem that's opposite of his: a fear of acceptance. Making a game out of the rejection game is all fun, except when you don't get rejections. Imagine the guy you ask for a ride across the town actually insists you take the ride with him. The girl (re: an earlier comment)who you ask for a number gives you her number, but also asks for yours, and actually calls you to make sure it's right.
So here's my conundrum: one one hand, there's a fear of going beyond my comfort zone. On the other there's what appears to be (likely quite unjustified) confidence that I will not get rejected as I hope. And thus, stasis.
Was it Twain (or Groucho Marx?) who said "I don't want to become part of any club that will happily take me as their member"? That's quite a problem for me, and it's not as devastating as general fear of approaching people, but still quite annoying.
I think I may know where you are coming from. I, too, am afraid of acceptance, but it's partly because I think I know better than others that I am not truly worthy of their acceptance. I am dismayed when really good people want to reach out to me and be friends. I feel like I will be living a lie if I try to buoy their misconception of my value and I do not want to disappoint them. But the mere thought of trying to maintain that lie (that I am worthy of their friendship and affection) is just so exhausting for me to even imagine. Therefore, it is so much easier for me to avoid acceptance and just live my hermetic little life. Which ultimately, leads me back to a fear of rejection, I guess. Hmm.
Ehh, you have not hung out with other people enough then. ;) You may be a 'loser', so to say, but most people around you are even bigger 'losers'. When I came to the country I am now in, I saw an image of amazing glowing enlightened creatures in my peers and everyone around me. Four years in, and I realize they are more immature, socially awkward and stranger than I ever was, and most of them are also lot stupider. These days, I beat myself over not figuring that out earlier. Look around yourself closely, and you'll realize hey, you're actually pretty awesome! :)
My philosophy on failure is a little different. I re-frame my actions as experiments. I come up with a hypothesis, and record the conditions and outcome of my experiments, then do a little mini-analysis on the results to try and understand it. Rather than view getting the outcome I wanted as success, I view learning from the experiment as a success, which is great, because you typically aren't in control of the outcome of events, but you absolutely are in control of how methodical you are. This also causes you to learn a lot faster than you otherwise would, which is great too.
I've worked with alongside cold-call sales people - not as a sales person myself.
Largely, my observation of them wasn't that they're particularly thick skinned, nor were they particularly desensitized to rejection. The thing that most of them had in common was that they weren't emotionally bound to the outcome. They didn't care if the person said yes or no - except for the endorphin kick they got when they saw their pay cheque get bigger. For most of them, it was a game they played against each other - in the same way you might enjoy a board game and you strive to win, but the real fun is the camaraderie of the players.
A rejection got a shoulder shrug and a "whatever, next" or a few choice curse words and the finger when the sales person wasted more time than necessary for a sale that never came before quickly moving on to the next call - the previous call forgotten as quickly as the next, unless the conversation was particularly humorous or worth sharing with their compatriots.
Those with no scruples learned to manipulate people really well and got the sales by whatever means necessary. Those that cared got sales by listening to the customer and understanding the customer's needs. Mostly though, almost without exception, those with the most sales were those that got through the highest volume phone calls in a day. The success rate could be skewed to have a higher ratio of sales to calls, but at the end of the day, that took emotional effort and didn't really yield any extra benefit to the sales person - of course, this potentially had a huge negative affect on the reputation of the company. I see the same thing with all the utility companies. Their sales teams are often the first point of contact for a customer. But the sales guys don't care about that, all they care about are the numbers. The rest is for customer service to figure out.
The lesson I learned from watching the sales guys in action is that all things considered equal, the greater the volume of calls, the greater your success. Don't be emotionally involved in the outcome before it's necessary to do so - at the end of the day, you're just asking her to come for coffee with you, you're not asking her to marry you. The more people you ask to go for coffee, the more chance you'll find someone that's got nothing better to do than go for coffee with you - even if you do think they're out of your league (that's another concept I don't believe in, but that's for another day and another post).
People are certainly "out of each other's league," at least in the sense that some people do not measure up to others' desires.
Of course, you can't really know what their qualifications are. Only they know, and they're going to run deeper than first impressions. So no, they're not out of your league yet!
Yes, but the whole concept of being out of someone's league has the underlying implication that the person you're considering is better than you somehow.
Just because they're not your cup of tea, or vice versa doesn't make them out of your league, they just make that person different than you. People are people, we all eat, drink, shit and do what we have to do to survive. Even the most "successful" CEO, the Queen of England and the person living on the street has the same basic needs. Everything else is a by-product of our circumstance and the way we choose to live our lives.
You're digging at that "everyone is unique" vibe, or "everybody wins." I don't really think it's relevant.
I think when people say that, it's typically along the lines of "that person is very [attractive|smart|rich|combo] and could have any of millions of partners at will. I'm unremarkable in all [perceivable|probably-important-to-them] ways, so it's an extreme longshot to pursue them."
Doesn't mean they're not wrong. Everyone has a chance, sure--Beauty and the Beast, right? But they might want to optimize for "people in their league," especially if the fear of rejection is in them like the guy in OP.
I agree. Optimize for what's important to you, nothing more. Eventually you'll find someone that's got everything that's important to you, where you have everything that's important to them...
The real trick is to optimize what's important to you and realize that most of the stuff that society/the media would have you think is important is really just meaningless shit. What matters is your connection with each other, do you have complementary perspectives, goals, motivations, desires and dreams? Do you make each other laugh? Do you enjoy each others company? The rest is just superficial nonsense.
> do people with such jobs deal exceptionally well with rejection?
Yes. Martin Seligman has done research (or at least reported the reasearch) on this and there is a full chapter about people doing cold calls in his "Learned Optimism" book.
No. :) From my experience, working such jobs, you put on a "diaper selling mask" to shield yourself from the blows. Some people get really angry when you call. Unless you're a total sociopath it's a job that gets you depressed if you do it for to long.
As a teenager I went to an all boys school, so was very shy with women. One day I just decided to get over my fear and resolved to ask for the telephone number of every pretty girl that caught my attention in public, even if they were with other girls. Importantly to the process was that it was never my intention to actually call the girl - just to see what percentage gave me their number. Since the outcome was not important, it did not matter if I was successful or not.
It worked surprisngly well. I got over my fear and was quite amazed at my success rate. IIRC it was around 25%, maybe even higher.
It was important to not be creepy, just friendly and withdraw if the situation became at all uncomfortable.
The question is how many of those 25% were fake numbers "just to get that creeper off my back". It's nice that you decided to "not be creepy", but it's not you who decides how your behaviour is judged.
That's a bit (I admit not entirely) like saying that "Maybe all those free-throws you practiced between games didn't score us any actual points."
100% of the women he didn't ask did not give him his number. The exercise served the purpose of pushing him past the fear that would have otherwise paralyzed him during a real request.
Except women are people, not inanimate objects to bounce balls off of. Those women did not choose to participate in SeanDav's practice, and it was not cost-free to them to be used and discarded that way.
More to brazzy's point, SeanDav doesn't get to decide how he comes across to people. Pretty young women get hit on constantly and it is really exhausting and demoralizing to be rudely interrupted every five minutes while out in public, by people who pretend to be friendly but clearly have ulterior motives. The girl - who was, by definition, interrupted for the umpteenth time that day - likely considered the interruption unpleasant and at least somewhat creepy. Withdrawing "if the situation becomes uncomfortable" is taking it many, many steps too far and is frankly wishful thinking - people in general, and girls especially, are not socialized to tell people to f--ck off right away so by the time the situation is so uncomfortable that the girl actually asks you to leave her alone, it is way past discomfort for her.
Not to mention that if all you really want to do is practice free-throws, you don't need to bust your way into the most elite basketball court to do it. Nothing wrong with practicing within your league. Why couldn't he get phone numbers from unattractive girls, or boys?
Pretty young women get hit on constantly and it is really exhausting and demoralizing to be rudely interrupted every five minutes while out in public
Holy hyperbole. I have two sisters that are very pretty and their chief complaint growing up was that men were too intimidated by them and never hit on them.
As a 6'7" man I cannot walk anywhere without being "rudely interrupted" as you say by people bringing up my height. It's the same old thing - "Wow, you're tall!" "Did you play basketball?" "How tall are you?" "Are your parents tall?" "Hey Giant" "Hey Too Tall" "Hey Stretch". Unlike you though I don't think it's rude. I think it's an attempt to initiate a conversation.
I think you're taking those staged "street harassment" videos too seriously.
I appreciate that you are relaying your sisters' experiences and I want to respect that they may be different from mine. I hope you can equally respect that I am speaking from personal experience as well, as opposed to watching those "staged" (huh?) street harassment videos. It is not a hyperbole to me, my twenties were spent getting hit on every 5 minutes while in public. Granted this was in NYC where street harassment is especially egregious.
It is not a hyperbole to me, my twenties were spent getting hit on every 5 minutes while in public.
So since it's not hyperbole, let's figure you were in public an hour a day in your twenties. That is 1 hour x 365 days x 10 years. So you were in public an estimated 3,650 hours during that decade. There are 12 five minute increments per hour, so that means you were hit on 43,800 times in your 20s. And that's only if you were in public an hour a day which is probably a fraction of reality! It's much more likely you've been hit on by literally hundreds of thousands of men if you weren't just making "exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally" (i.e. the definition of hyperbole if you were unaware).
You poor thing, you must make Helen of Troy look like a hag.
I don't understand. I am telling you what my actual experience was, and you are saying it must be a hyperbole because... you personally find it hard to believe? I've re-read your comment several times and all I can see is that you've added up the numbers and then just decided that they cannot possibly be true.
Your Helen of Troy put-down has nothing to do with my comment. If I were to say that I get hundreds of spam emails every day, it would be a statement of fact, not a claim that I am so rich that I make King Midas look destitute. You don't have to look like the most beautiful woman in history to get hit on, you just need to be conventionally attractive and physically present.
Ironically, it seems you're trying to sympathize with women by saying they're not inanimate objects to bounce balls off of, but you're still denying them autonomy.
When women want attention, they dress attractively. When they don't want attention, they dress casually. It's just like birds. Ever wonder why they call it the birds and the bees? If you're a guy and you hit on women in sweatpants, you'll most likely fail, b/c those women are not signalling their availability and interest.
And before someone goes all "women should be able to dress however they want and not get raped," consider that I'm not advocating rape. I'm pointing out that the previous poster asked "attractive" women for their phone numbers, not every woman. Logically, this implies that he was asking women who were seeking attraction by dressing attractively and presenting themselves as available and seeking mates, just like birds who sing to signal their availability.
The reason everyone confuses attractiveness is that our media present it as a thing that you have or don't. "Movie stars have it, computer nerds don't." But the real truth is that attractiveness is something you do. When you want to "get out there," to signal your availability and interest in mating, you do attractiveness. It doesn't matter how fat or pimply you are: You adorn yourself, you clean yourself, wear fancy clothes, you grab attention, you impress people, try hairstyles. Once you're married, reproducing, dropping kids off in a minivan on Saturday morning, you wear sweatpants and other casual clothes and no one (except social retards, of which there are unfortunately plenty) hits on you. Or else if you miss that egoistic feeling of being attractive, you dress up a little bit and reject all the people that hit on you.
This is how it works. It's just one step advanced from non-speaking mammals. Political correctness is just an attempt to cover up the realities that not everyone understands, just like religion and the Republican party are shorthand behaviors/scripts for people to follow when they don't know exactly what to do.
> Logically, this implies that he was asking women who were seeking attraction by dressing attractively and presenting themselves as available and seeking mates, just like birds who sing to signal their availability.
Hm, the male gaze is heavy with this one. Has it ever occurred to you that people (of whatever gender) might like to put on clothes to please themselves? Because it makes them feel nice? Your assumption that the only possible reason to do that could be to "show availability" and that it was done with other people, and their regard, in mind, is awfully egocentric of you.
Incidentally, i agree with your thesis that attractiveness isn't a have/have not thing, nor is it about normative tastes with regards to appearance. This is, however, orthogonal to whether or not women exist simply to mate with, and that they signal this by clothing choices (which is what you're implying, by denying that anyone would dress a certain way for other reasons).
Turns out people wear nice clothes for a whole lotta reasons, and even beyond that the attention they might want is probably not the attention you're about to give. You can't divine the other's context, which is why the less creepy ways of meeting someone almost always involve relating over explicitly shared context.
>Why couldn't he get phone numbers from unattractive girls, or boys?
A charitable assumption is that he thought approaching unattractive women wouldn't sufficiently affect his anxiety when speaking to attractive women and decided the benefit for him would outweigh the aggregate cost for them. As for asking men for their phone numbers, I assumed he either never considered it or feared being attacked in response (reasonably).
> Those women did not choose to participate in SeanDav's practice, and it was not cost-free to them to be used and discarded that way.
Isn't it sad that the womens' fathers treated their mothers like inanimate objects when they courted them for marriage (or whatever level of relationship led to child-bearing that produced those women ) ?
Those mothers-to-be did not choose to participate in the fathers-to-be's practice, and it was not cost-free for them to be used and courted that way.
Those mothers-to-be were exhaustedly and demoralizingly and rudely interrupted, perhaps as often as every 5 minutes (although there are no sources to back this up) while out in public, by people who pretended to be friendly but had ulterior motives. Those mothers-to-be considered that interruption unpleasant and at least somewhat creepy, even though that awful inappropriate experience actually led to a couple who created a new generation of human beings for the world.
Those mothers-to-be were not socialized to tell those fathers-to-be to f-ck off right away, otherwise they wouldn't have had (at least some) lifelong relationships that produced children. Some of those mothers-to-be were certainly made extremely uncomfortable. How dare those fathers-to-be take action on their biological instincts?!?
It's not rude to interact with a person in public. As long as he didn't harass, and he respected the women's choice if they didn't want to talk, there's no harm done.
Many friends of mine have met their significant others through spontaneous interactions like this. It's not as uncommon as you'd think.
Why couldn't he get phone numbers from unattractive girls, or boys?
Are you serious? This is rather insulting to so-called "unattractive" girls.
Indeed, better that SeanDev have suffered a lifetime of loneliness and social anxiety than an attractive woman suffer through even a single socially awkward moment. God knows their lives are hard enough already.
My question would be, what's a real alternative to practice making perfect, done in the way that best respects the person being asked out and their physical integrity?
"Not doing anything at all" seems unrealistic, in a world where males are essentialized as the pursuers and women as the pursued, an unfortunate but for now real state of affairs.
"Simply will yourself to normalcy!" is almost offensive to me, since it simultaneously ignores the lived experience of the person feeling it and puts moral censure on the addressee--if there's some issue X in your life, it's entirely your fault. It's like telling someone that the only reason they aren't financially successful is that they're lazy.
I'm all ears, seriously, especially after the Scott Aaronson/Alexander debacle a couple weeks ago. It seems like a real issue in our society.
Practice is great! Girls want to meet guys as much as guys want to meet girls! Here is my take on how to do it respectfully:
1) Do not limit yourself to only the prettiest girls. The whole beautiful girl/rich guy dichotomy is ugly. Do you want to be seen as a full-spectrum human being and not just a walking wallet? Then see girls as full-spectrum human beings and not just tits on legs.
2) For god's sake, do not set up a lose-lose situation for the other person. SeanDev's practice method has two possible outcomes: if the girl does not like him, well then he just added to the endless stream of go-nowhere "sales calls" that she has to answer all day long; but if she does like him, then she feels sad and disappointed that he didn't call for a date. The whole thing is just so... disingenuous and defeatist.
3) Practice in an environment where girls are actually looking to meet guys. Dating sites is one obvious example, bars is another. Ambushing women as they go about their daily business is problematic. Human interactions are complex and there are no scripts but the closer you can get to implied consent the better.
3a) It's hard for anyone to meet sexually/intellectually/temperamentally compatible people on the street. I am a conventionally attractive woman; I've been approached on the street probably over 10,000 times (a totally unscientific but conservative back-of-the-envelope estimate) and I can tell you that it's never led to anything. Bars and parties have better outcomes, and being out and about doing fun stuff has yet better outcomes. For example yoga and volunteering are over-run by women, at least in cities where I've lived.
4) The initial conversation with someone you want to get with is no different than the initial conversation with someone you have no interest in getting with. I think that's the hardest thing for some guys to wrap their head around, hence all the weird "cheat codes for women" floating about. Social anxiety is a real thing but there is no rule that you need to hit on the prettiest girl in the room to get over it. I've practiced my social skills on strangers that I have no interest in, and it's helped me a lot. Granted my social anxiety is not very high to begin with - if yours is debilitating, see a doctor, it's treatable!
Speaking of social anxiety. I don't want to re-open the whole Scott Aaronson debacle either but since you mentioned him I'd like to point out that he actually went to a physician to request castration as a solution to his social anxiety issues so we are talking about an exceptionally disturbed individual who attempted a full-on sexual suicide. The vast majority of people - men and women both - are not looking to "kill" themselves so I think it's superfluous to bring him into this discussion. I don't mean that as a jab, I just mean that it is unhelpful to mentally lump yourself in with someone like SA.
Solid advice, and I like your point about SA--his experience was extreme enough that I wouldn't be surprised if it's totally unique, and yet everyone wants to have a debate as if his is typical or representative.
Sometimes the girl will feel good and confident the whole day after receiving a compliment, as long as it is in a polite and respectful way, even when they ignore it or roll their eyes to it...anyway it's a delicate matter.
Yes, the exercise anecdotally served the purpose of improving his confidence. But no, your assumption that he would be unable to ask for a number he really wanted is unfounded and has nothing to do with your false analogy.
Also, asking for something you're not emotionally invested in has little bearing to asking for something you're emotionally invested in. As an example: Asking someone you only just met for their number bears little resemblance to asking a someone you really like to go for coffee or dinner with you... when you're emotionally invested, rejection stings.
The analogy would be to throw the ball, but not look if he missed it or not. It's like practicing free throws by blindly throwing ball to basket's general direction and not knowing of outcome.
If someone is completely terrified of even attempting a free throw, then there's no sense in worrying whether they sink the shot. Until that terror is overcome, the fact that they try at all is a success.
Really? Try to imagine a world where EVERY guy resolved to ask 1 pretty girl a day for her phone number to improve his own self confidence. Now imagine being a pretty girl in such a world. Now try to figure out what purpose the pretty girl is serving in this self help exercise and if she had the option to opt out?
"What he's really doing is using interaction with women as practice to be better at interaction with women.
"
Specifically, by learning to not care about the women in question or the interactions.
This is why comparing talking to people with shooting freethrows is goddamn weird. People are not basketball rims. The basketball rim lacks subjective experience.
> Specifically, by learning to not care about the women in question or the interactions.
Well, at least some fear of rejection is fuelled by caring too much. 'If I ask her out and she says no then she'll hate me and they'll hate me and I'll hate me and I'll want to die and I'll curl up into a ball and retreat from the world and die!'
Sometimes one does have to learn to care a little bit less, in order to get the chance start to learn how to genuinely care for the real person, not the made-up person in one's mind.
I'd argue what he did was learn not to care about his own natural reaction to the situation, which is different. He also set ground rules to avoid making the women uncomfortable.
So what exactly is SeanDav caring about again? In the case where a girl did give him a phone number, assuming that number is real, what is the expectation of the girl giving him a means for further contact? Did he go into this exchange making sure she knew he had no intention to call her? Something here obviously doesn't mesh. In all other cases, as someone else pointed out, the discomfort threshhold has loooong been passed by the time the girl has said anything. He's learned jack all about her view.
e: The reliable indicator that you're weirding out some random woman is that you're not in a single's bar and acting like your trying to have sex with her.
It's possible (probable) that he had developed a fear of rejection due to his divorce, but the very fact that he had a divorce indicates that he had been able to date and marry in the first place (to a poor choice, no doubt). I'm sure that his approach was able to return him to where he was before, and perhaps improve him, but I wonder if it would be any good for someone with a deep-seated fear of rejection, or if it might not make things worse (perhaps due to a few scenarios ending poorly, or the subject finding himself unable to complete even the simplest ones, and retreating further into himself).
Very good article, but I would say that exposure therapy has limits. I live in an area with lots of rattlesnakes and am terrified of them. I'm certainly not going to risk a venomous bite to get over my fear.
They actually use somewhat the opposite of this type of training with dogs to keep them from messing with rattlesnakes. It's more controlled, so the rattlesnake has a rubber band that keeps its mouth shut and the conditioning is given to the dog using a shock collar, but it doesn't take too many shocks before the dog won't go anywhere near a rattlesnake. It may seem cruel, but for dogs that live in area with lots of rattlesnakes where they allowed outside on their own, it can be lifesaving.
Now that I'm thinking about it, opposite is probably the wrong word...it's more of the reverse. Whereas the man in the story is using the game to condition himself to learn that there's no (emotional) shock where one is expected, the dog trainers use exposure therapy to train dogs that there is a shock where one isn't expected. They're two sides of the same coin.
Actually generalized fear of the venemous snakes is irrational. It's an overgeneralization. You should be afraid of stepping on or near a snake by accident. But if you are 20 feet away from a rattlesnake who is aware of your presence, you are not in any danger.
I believe this is correct. Fear of a snake isn't irrational because it resides in a very primitive part of our brain. But when that fear becomes prohibitive and makes it difficult for you to do every-day things then it has become irrational. That's where exposure therapy can be successful. Its not going to eliminate that primitive fear. That's almost instinct in humans at this point. But it is going to make it so you can watch TV without worrying about seeing a snake on it. Or, rather, make it so you don't care that there's a snake on it I guess.
Fascinating. I do a lot of amateur theatre and one of the most useful things about it is that it forces you to do similar things to on a regular basis and it really does help a lot in various aspects of life. In particular it really helps deal with interview and presentation stress. I'm very tempted to give this a go myself.
Exposure to your fears is a pretty standard method out of the wide spectrum of cognitive-behavioural-therapy tools. Of course, preparation for that is the most important part of it. AFAIK, it works for about a third to half of the patients, depending on what measurement for success you apply.
Well, it's a great way of finding out what people really think about you. Obviously, this cannot work on a large scale, because a lot of what society does is making sure that people NEVER find out what they think about each other.
It seems to me, though, that if we did, we wouldn't care. Sure it would bother me if two people I work with whom I respect told me what they truly thought of me and it was incongruous with my expectation of what they thought of me. But I think if I found out what EVERYONE thought of me it would quickly stop caring.
But I guess to your point, if that happened then structures of society would break down. Still, I'm not sure that would be a bad thing necessarily since at the very least we'd start being completely honest with one another. Kind of makes me thing of the movie The Invention Of Lying.
I doubt that. It's just that gamification requires you to buy into the premise of the game in the first place: to agree to try to maximize whatever "point" system the game scores you with. In some sense, income is a point system which you're almost certainly trying to maximize.
Your comment reminds me of myself when I used to claim marketing doesn't work on me, and that it even made me less likely to buy things. And then found out about the brown bag effect (a marketing technique which uses drab colors and minimal text to look non-flashy). Gamification isn't as developed a science as marketing, but it still works pretty well, and it's very unlikely that it doesn't work on you.
People are motivated by different things. This guy was motivated by quantitative value tracking with defined goals ('scores', 'winning'). Some people's brains increase levels of serotonin in response to situations where they perceive they've done something good - you have a physical neural response to a psychological event. Other people's brains don't (or they release less serotonin, or there's serotonin uptake inhibitor at work somewhere). People like that doesn't feel 'good' in response to 'winning' so classical gamification doesn't work.
The key to motivation is to make a psychological bridge between things that you don't want to do and the emotional state that releases neurological chemicals that in turn make you feel happy.
I got a lot of numbers by having a small robot set up with a phone, whereby sending a SMS to that phone with a command would execute it. Add a bit of busking. Doesn't mean anyone will want to talk back if you call later, though ;)
If my wife had divorced me and i ended up a crying heap on the floor like this guy i would probably want to try this. Most people are not in that situation though, it's all relative.
Fear of failure isn't something that only people who've been divorced and are crying heaps experience. If you've ever hesitated to ask a girl (or man) out, you know what this guy's talking about. I think this is a pretty novel approach to confronting that fear.
I find this to be useful in other situations though, like asking +X% more of rise or in an interview, or asking for a better deal with your internet provider, or just a discount in an store.
Exactly. I'm interviewing with several places now. Even when it doesn't work out, I don't frame that as a "failure" but rather as practice for the next interview. That reframing does wonders for my morale.
I didn't have many friends in school. I never tried to fit in - I found other people in my class to be predictable and uninteresting and it took me too much energy to pretend that I was enjoying their company. I went through several years of school with no friends at all - At times, 'cool' kids would invite me to play sports with them after school but I never did. I spent all my lunch breaks alone programming games on school library computers.
I don't have much fear of rejection nowadays. I consistently choose the most difficult life decisions because I like challenges.
I have no intention of questioning your choices, but I think you may be mistaking communing with others as some sort of easy way out. Personally, I find it pretty hard, so perhaps it'd be worth your time to try more real, deep interaction with people you don't know. It can be a serious challenge, and while having no fear of rejection is perhaps ideal, I don't think I would call intentional introversion the most difficult possible life decision.
Most people are not deep - They don't really think - They just blindly try to adhere to various stereotypes.
Everyone does that to some extent (including me) but there are many levels. Some people don't think even at the most trivial levels...
For example, if someone identifies as a 'Geek' - They will often convince themselves that they like Star Wars, Legos, Sci-Fi, comic books, etc... But in reality, they really never actually gave these topics any thought based on their own individual merits.
If you like a challenge, why did you fold from the challenge of enjoying a sense of community with those that appear uninteresting to you? Everyone has something to learn and something to teach. I bet if you'd stuck it out, there was much you could have learned from them, and them from you. Closing yourself off in a room robs both you and them from a chance to grow.
I hear that a lot, but I just don't have about more than even 30 minutes of pretend interest to give people I find boring.
Maybe I'm an asshole, but I genuinely prefer to just sit alone and think about things than talk to people I find boring, even if they have yet another funny story about something to do with fishing that's slightly different than the others.
This isn't to say I don't go to the bar and chat up people in small time windows, I just don't bother to spend several hours talking to someone I don't find interesting.
Most of the talk is superficial talk about stuff that doesn't matter. They're telling you because you're listening. They haven't got to the deep stuff yet, perhaps they're not invested in you(?) Why do they enjoy fishing? Perhaps they like the solitude, why? Maybe it's the same reason you enjoy it. Maybe they don't like people either. Why is that? Perhaps it's the same reason as you. Perhaps there is a deeper underlying topic to discuss than that fish they caught that's slightly different than the other person's fish. You're confusing superficial small talk with meaningful conversation. Maybe you're not digging because you don't care and that's fair enough. The bigger question is why don't you care? Is there nothing more to that person than meets the eye? Or do you just not care about them enough to dig past the superficial small talk to the real person underneath?
What is it you prefer to think about rather than reach out and make a meaningful connection with others?
If you are really happy then just ignore me, this advice is freely given and freely ignored. I only give it because of a perception I have based off of a small glimpse into your life. So if you are happy just ignore it and move on, hopefully I can offer a different perspective.
Sometimes the most difficult thing is to go out of our comfort zone. I'm guessing that's what you want to here from this community, and I'd say it's true. I did the same thing in high school, but I did have a core group of friends who got me (they didn't even attend my hs). My advice is to seek out people who's friendship will last beyond your current situation and who are easy for you to talk to. Difficult people to talk to are important but they aren't the ones we latch onto thought life.
Also, sometimes the hardest thing for me is to talk to people who I think are not as smart as I am, but everyone knows something you don't, even if that is what is fissionable. And who knows you might find someone with common interests, or who wants to talk to you about your game.
Or, to paraphrase many an artist and CEO: if I have not failed today, it means I have not been ambitious enough.