Succeed Socially.com News/Updates/Blog

Social Skills And Self-Help Advice That Hasn’t Worked For Me

New article:

Social Skills And Self-Help Advice That Hasn’t Worked For Me

January 16, 2008

Revised a couple more articles

The tidying up continues. I revised/reorganized these two articles:

How to make friends and get a social life

The importance of getting your appearance in order (name is changed, used to be the one on looking better)

I’ve edited a couple more to a lesser degree, but I’m always doing that. One more revised article and one more new article coming.

January 15, 2008

Removed some vague, loaded phrases from the site

No new article in this update. What I did do is go through the site and remove certain vague, loaded terms from the articles. As far as I can tell, these terms are gone:

-Introvert/Extrovert
-Geek
-Nerd

They’re still there in the odd spot, mostly to describe a label other people might use. I’m not using them any more myself though. For one, no one can really agree on what these terms mean any more. The words all encompass a mix of traits, strengths, and weaknesses. But everyone has a different idea of what particular things should and shouldn’t be in their definitions. It’s way too vague and murky for me.

I can try using them as a succinct way to describe something, but other people may not interpret the term in the way I intended. I may as well write the three specific words I want to talk about, instead of using something like ‘introvert’ and hoping the reader knows what I meant to say.

Check out these urbandictionary.com definitions for geek and nerd. The entries are all over the place and the terms are almost effectively meaningless. And look how everyone wants to redefine the term in a way that doesn’t hurt their ego. The same with ‘introvert’. Pretty much every online discussion I’ve read that uses the word will digress into a debate of what the term “really” means before long.

Also, some people are defensive and sensitive about having these terms applied to them. They don’t want to be called something at all, or they get annoyed if you use the term in the “wrong” way (i.e., with a negative connotation). It’s just easier not to use these words any more and avoid all that.

It also forces me to be more precise with what I want to say myself. As I was editing out all my uses of the terms, I was surprised at how haphazardly I threw them around. One sentence I’d use ‘geek’ to mean one thing, the next I’d use it to imply something totally different.

One loaded word I kept in was “weird”. I’ve gotten emails saying, “There’s nothing wrong with being weird. Weird people have accomplished…” In my experience though, there’s a definite downside to being weird in a certain way. Being artsy and creative is one thing, but being strange, inappropriate, and out of touch with the world is another. I’m fine with the good stuff, but not with the bad. If someone can come up with a term that describes just the bad aspects of weirdness though, I’ll happily use that instead.

January 11, 2008

At Times It’s Socially Practical To Know About Things Other People Care About

I’ve pretty much totally re-written the article Knowledge And Skills That Are Socially Practical To Have. I’ve shifted the focus from, “It’s good to know x,y,z”, to reasons learning this stuff has helped me. I’ve also qualified and softened the main message a bit, compared to how it was before:

At Times It’s Socially Practical To Know About Things Other People Care About

It’s one way I’m tweaking this site’s content as part of my New Year updates. More to come soon.

January 10, 2008

Some Tips On How To Be Less Quiet In Conversations

Got a new article up. It’s actually mostly little points that were scattered across several existing articles being gathered together and fleshed out:

Some Tips On How To Be Less Quiet In Conversations

Why create an article this way? Well, I’m doing some tidying up of the site for the new year. Reorganizing some stuff and tweaking some of the content. I’ll try to get some of these updates up in the following days.

January 8, 2008

It’s Fine If You Don’t Drink, But Don’t Be Too Uptight About It

Yeeeaaaahhh, got an interesting one today. I don’t think everyone agree with it, but sometimes I have to write stuff like this:

It’s Fine If You Don’t Drink, But Don’t Be Too Uptight About It

I also reorganized the index on the main page to put the articles that deal with more controversial topics under one heading. Everything I talk about is based on what’s worked in my own experience, but I realize some of it goes against more typical advice.

December 10, 2007