First person shooters often begin with a tutorial of some kind. MMORPGs have a newbie zone where the monsters don’t attack you without provocation. In the starting zone, things are easy, and it’s very unlikely that you’ll fail.
Of course, if you never leave the starting zone, you miss out on most of the game. Leaving the tutorial means you’ll probably end up dying a few times, but it also means you get far more enjoyment.
In real life, we’ve got something like the starting zone—it’s your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is the conversation topics you’ve already discussed many times before. It’s the activities you’ve already experienced. It’s the people you’ve already gotten to know.
There’s nothing wrong with the things in your comfort zone. It’s awesome to have favorite hobbies and people you feel really comfortable with. But your comfort zone is limited. There is, so much that life has to offer. And if you stick only with what’s comfortable, you’ll miss out.
So today’s quest is about expanding your comfort zone.
Quest 1.3 (Type: Collection)
Quest Objective:
Find something you’ve never done before.
And then go do it.
(Optional) Go do it again!
Quest Description:
Pick something meaningful. It’s not very meaningful to watch a Youtube video you’ve never watched before. It’s much more meaningful to try yoga, explore a park near your house for the first time, or volunteer at a soup kitchen.
In general, you should feel a little nervous—if you are totally calm, you’re probably still within your comfort zone. You might try asking yourself “On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is as scary as possible and 1 is not scary at all, how scary is this?” You probably want to try things that are in the 4-6 range on that scale.
That being said, the thing you pick should be something you actually want to do. It’s good if it feels scary or hard, but it’s not good if it just feels unpleasant. The point is to find an experience that will be rewarding, not something that is miserable. So if you know you’ll hate the opera, don’t choose an opera visit as your comfort zone expander.
Some possible ideas:
Visit a local museum
Go to the bookstore or library and read the first chapter of a book from a genre you’ve never read before. Buy the book if the first chapter holds your interest.
Find a local park or running trail. Go for a walk or a jog.
Google for “things to do in [your city].” Pick one.
Volunteer for a day at a homeless shelter.
Eat at a style of restaurant that you’ve never been to before—for instance, an ethnic restaurant or a vegan restaurant.
Get some pencils and paper and try drawing something. Or buy some kids’ art supplies and rediscover fingerpainting or coloring books.
Visit a class for a type of exercise you’ve never done before.
Drive to a nearby city that you’ve never been to before. Explore the city without looking up anything about it beforehand, and eat dinner at a local restaurant that you discover during your wanderings.
Quest Rewards:
Build your confidence
Expand your comfort zone
Discover a new hobby or passion
Side Quests:
Activate co-op mode! Invite a friend along to any of these experiences.
Change something from your daily routine, and maintain that change for a whole week. For instance, if you normally switch on the computer immediately after waking up, see what happens if you read a book for ten minutes first. If you normally take the freeway home from work, see what happens if you take some side streets instead.
Try something that you think you’ll dislike, just to see what happens. For instance, even if you assume you dislike crowds, try going to a crowded concert. You might enjoy it more than you think—or you might learn that you can tolerate discomfort more than you thought.
Level Four: Go Into The Tall Grass
I’m a Pokémon purist.
I’ve only played Red and Blue and I think there are really only 150 Pokémon (151 if you count Missingno). Nowadays, when I listen to conversations about Pokémon, I’m flummoxed by everything that’s new. There’s IVs, EVs, new Pokémon types—and also Pokémon can be shiny now for some reason? An awful lot has changed.
But there’s one constant since the first Pokémon game: if you want to find new Pokémon, you need to go into the tall grass.
Pokémon generally don’t come to you. There’s a specific place where you go if you want to catch them.
The same thing is true for meeting new potential friends. You need to go to the places where those connections are most likely to form.
Obviously, you can find people almost everywhere. But there are certain contexts where friendships are likely to grow, and contexts where they’re not. While it’s possible to befriend someone you meet in a grocery store, it’s very unlikely. People don’t come to grocery stores to socialize, so you’re likely to come across as strange if you try to start a personal conversation.
Conversely, if you join something like a book club or a dance class, it’s much easier to form friendships with the people you meet. At events like this, you have a lot of opportunities for conversation, and conversation is encouraged. Plus, you know you have at least one thing in common with everyone there.
It’s easy to find the “tall grass” where potential friendships can be made. Just look for gatherings that fit these four criteria.
This gathering should foster interaction between strangers. In other words, it should be easy for you to start a conversation with people that you do not know. A concert does not foster interaction, because most people going to a concert only talk with their friends. A theater class does foster interaction, because you will naturally interact with others as you practice your scenes together.
The gathering should be something that you will probably enjoy doing. If you hate a particular activity, it will be hard to motivate yourself to go, and you will probably not get along super well with people who love that activity.
The people at the gathering should be friendly, positive people. In other words, if you go to a social event and everyone seems rude and unfriendly, you might want to try another event.
You should have the opportunity to meet new people every time you go. If you hang out with your best friends every Friday night, that’s great, but it doesn’t count for this quest because it doesn’t give you the opportunity to meet new people.
To sum it up: If you want to expand your social circle, you need to go to events where you can meet new people that have the potential to be good friends. You need to go into the tall grass.
Quest 1.4 (Type: Weekly)
Quest Objectives:
Go to a social gathering where you might meet new potential friends
Do this once a week for one month.
Quest Description:
You can do the same gatherings each week or different ones—whichever option gives you the best chance of making friends. You can also try more than one social gathering each week if you like.
Some possible ways to find social gatherings:
Check Meetup.com for groups that meet in your area
Check the Craigslist activities and group sections (although use common sense and stay safe!)
Contact the game stores in your area and see if they host any game nights.
Google for [things to do] + [your city] or [places to meet people] + [your city]
Research religious organizations in your area—most churches have community events throughout the week. If you’re not religious, you might still make some friends at an event geared towards visitors.
Look up classes for something that you’re interested in—like theater, art, photography, or cooking.
See if your community theater has open auditions
Contact your local library and book stores and see if they have any book clubs.
Check
out Toastmasters.org and find a club near you (they’re free to visit!)
Look for volunteer opportunities.
If you are a college student, look up clubs and student groups on campus, and visit one.
Look for physical activities featuring social interaction—like a dance class or a team sport.
To sum it up: Once a week for a month, go somewhere fun where it’s easy to meet new people. Sound like a plan?
Quest Rewards:
Opportunity to meet new people
Opportunity to practice your conversation skills
Explore new hobbies and discover fun things to do.
Side Quests:
Create a social gathering where other people can meet. The easiest way to do this is to plan an event where you invite different groups of friends. For instance, if you know people from a bowling league and from a theater class, organize a movie night where you invite both groups. That way people from the bowling league have the opportunity to befriend people from your theater class, and vice versa.
Try for two or three events a week instead of one.
Bring a friend to one of these events!
Level Five: Infinite Lives
In most classic games, you had a limited number of lives. Run out of lives, and it was game over—start back at the beginning. This design feature was inspired by arcade gaming, because it was in an arcade owner’s best interest to force you to pony up more quarters for more lives.
But as arcades became less relevant for gaming, game developers started to reconsider the idea of limited lives. Why force a player to start over just because they used up their last life? So developers started phasing out the life system, and nowadays it’s very rare to find a game that will show you a “Game Over” screen. In most modern games, dying just drops you back at your latest checkpoint, with no further consequence.
Of course, there are benefits to more high-stakes gameplay. In recent years rougelike games (where you get a single life and dying means starting from scratch) have become increasingly popular. When every decision counts, the game becomes much more engrossing.
But rougelikes can be exhausting to play. When a single mistake could mean that all of my progress is lost, I tend to anxiously ponder every decision. And when I do make a mistake, it can be deeply frustrating. I’ve yelled at my poor computer more than once when playing Don’t Starve (and I still have unresolved anger towards those darn swamp tentacles.)
Of course, you bought a book on growing your social life, not a book on game design. So what’s my point?
Simple.
In social settings, most people act like they’re playing a rougelike. They assume that a single mistake will DOOM THEM FOREVER, so social interaction becomes about avoiding mistakes instead of having fun and connecting with others.
But here’s the reality. In most social interactions, it’s totally fine to make mistakes. In fact, everyone makes mistakes pretty much all the time in social interaction.
Don’t believe me? Just listen in to everyone else next time you’re in a group conversation. You’ll hear the other people in the group interrupt each other, tell jokes that fall flat, share boring stories—all sorts of mistakes. And for the most part, everyone moves along with skipping a beat when those mistakes happen. Sure, maybe there’s a moment of awkwardness, but then someone changes topics and the conversation moves along.
In other words, social interaction is more like a game with infinite lives than a rougelike game. Of course, it’s better to avoid social mistakes if possible, and if you hurt or offended someone, you should definitely apologize and make amends.
But if you make a mistake, you get to try again. Even in a worst case scenario where you mess up a conversation so badly that the person doesn’t want to talk to you anymore, you can always talk to someone else. There’s always another social respawn waiting.
And that means you don’t have to be afraid. You can let yourself relax, and maybe even be a little playful. If you make a mistake, it’s okay— just apologize, and do your best to not repeat that mistake in the future.
Quest 1.5 (Type: Collection)
Quest Objectives:
Make ten deliberate social mistakes
See if the world ends
Quest Description
I promise, I’m not crazy.
Yes, I know you bought this book to find social success, not deliberately sabotage yourself. But hear me out.
If you’re like many people, your fear of social failure is much bigger than it needs to be. When you spend so much time avoiding failure, you never get the chance to really enjoy social interaction. Who is going to have more fun—someone trying to make it through a game without losing a single life, or someone trying to explore all of the cool features the game designers programmed?
The cool thing about fear is that if you deliberately confront it, it tends to back down. The first time you ride a roller coaster, it’s terrifying. The tenth time you ride it, it’s probably not scary at all. That’s what this quest is all about.
Of course, you should only do harmless mistakes. The goal is to choose social mistakes that feel scary, but that won’t actually cause any harm to you or anyone else.
Here are some ideas:
Deliberately tell a joke that isn’t very funny. (Aka, Google for “dad jokes”)
Make plans with a friend. After making the plans, call back in an hour or so and ask to change some minor detail of the plans (for instance, ask if you can meet at 4 PM instead of 3 PM.)
Leave your wallet in the car before entering a grocery store. Pick out something to buy, bring it to the register, then “realize” that you forgot your wallet when it’s time to pay. Apologize, get the wallet, and pay as normal.
You probably noticed that these ideas range from small mistakes (unfunny joke) to big mistakes (lost wallet.) When you try this yourself, I recommend starting with small mistakes, and working your way up to bigger and bigger mistakes. Just remember to never risk mistakes that could cause anyone real harm.
Also, if social interaction in general is very scary for you, I strongly encourage you to talk to a therapist. This level is designed to help people with moderate amounts of anxiety, but it’s best to have a professional help you with high levels. The good news is that social anxiety is incredibly treatable. So talk with a therapist if your anxiety levels feel out of control or really distressing.
Quest Rewards:
Less anxiety
More confidence
Fun stories to tell about your deliberate mistakes!
Side Quests:
Read up on exposure therapy for social anxiety (that’s where the ideas in this level are borrowed from.) Brainstorm a few new ideas for mistakes that you can practice making.
If your level of anxiety feels higher than you’d like, research therapists in your area and consider contacting one.
Before trying each social mistake, write down how you expect others will react. After doing the mistake, notice their reaction and compare it to your prediction.
Level Six: Hardware
I had hours of happy memories playing the original StarCraft during my childhood—I even set up a StarCraft LAN party for one of my birthdays. So it was a no-brainer that I would pick up StarCraft 2 soon after it was released.
Unfortunately, I quickly ran into a problem. My PC was full of aging components that I had not upgraded for years. My computer put up a valiant effort, but it just wasn’t up to the challenge of rendering StarCraft 2. See, as a game of StarCraft 2 progressed, the armies grew in size. This meant there were more units to render, which meant my poor computer had to work harder and harder, which meant that eventually it just couldn’t keep up.
I would start a match with everything working fine. Then the map would start to fill with units, my computer would start to chug, and my frame rate would fall into the single digits. Needless to say, I did not win a lot of StarCraft 2 matches on my aging computer.
Fortunately, there was a
solution to my problem. I patiently saved my money, and bought a bunch of shiny new PC parts. StarCraft 2 ran great on the new hardware, and I was able to win a lot more games.
You have hardware too—it’s called your body. And just as my StarCraft performance was impaired until I upgraded my computer, your social performance will be impaired if you don’t take care of your body.
The reason is pretty simple. There’s a ton of research that shows that if you exercise regularly, you’ll have more energy and a happier mood. Now, let’s say you’re talking to someone. Are you more likely to make a positive impression if you’re tired and sad, or if you’re energetic and upbeat?
Of course, there are all sorts of other benefits to exercise that go beyond social interaction (like not dying from a heart attack.) But let’s focus on the social benefits. If you take care of your body, your body will provide the power for you to put your best foot forward.
And you don’t need to make dramatic changes to reap the benefit. The most important thing is to make a change that you can stick with. The CDC recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise (ie, brisk walking, leisurely bicycling) or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise (ie, running, fast cycling) per week. That’s not too bad—either 30 minutes of moderate exercise five times a week, or 25 minutes of vigorous exercise three times a week. You don’t even need to do it all at once, so you could try getting in three ten-minute walking sessions instead of one thirty-minute walking session.
Level Up Your Social Life: The Gamer's Guide To Social Success Page 2
