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.

Thanks. And no excuses! :-)

Haha touché!

Really great read, thanks for sharing.

You're a great writer

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.

"You have to find the fun in failure." -- Yes, that helps! And, on the contrary, it is too easy to enjoy excuses and pet grudges. Let's grow good habits and grow out of bad ones.

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

Wow! So even a woman enjoys reading this stuff? I'm glad to hear that. I was afraid my male orientation would make that harder.

No, she now alerts me to the new episodes :)

Seriously, you have no idea how much effect your writing has had.

The simple fact that you've been so open about this makes it discussable for other people, and that in turn can help them to help themselves.

The funny thing is that the day before I found your 10th day installment I actually had a little 'assignment' worked out where I wanted her to go out and have a conversation with some random stranger. Then the next day - the day it was supposed to happen - I found your writings and instead of asking her to go out and connect with someone I let her read your writing.

I'm quite sure that that was much more effective than one more of my 'harebrained' plans :)

Heh, I thought we were the only HN couple :-P this "hacker" thing looks less creepy now that she reads a few interesting articles a day.

"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.