Johan van der Merwe in Johannesburg is doing 26 things including…

Improve my social skills

6 cheers

 

Johan van der Merwe has written 2 entries about this goal

Realizing that all people are idiots helps 8 months ago

My experiences and the things I have been reading over the last year or so have made me realize that people are actually all a bunch of idiots who don’t deserve my respect. Having lost respect for people I no longer worry so much any more about what they will think of me when I talk to them.

I found that people who are of a lower social status than me are much easier to talk to because you don’t have to respect them and that means you just say whatever you like without thinking too much about it. I then found that people of higher social status are all idiots and that put them in a lower status for me which means I can now talk to them easily.

I now try to base my opinion of the status of a person not on their social status but on my own opinion of what their status is to me. Anyone who is intelligent and can think for themself ranks highly with me and the same with good and honest people.

It does still present me with the problem of speaking freely to people I think deserve respect but at the same time it has widened my conversation base. By practising conversation on the idiots I hope to improve my ability to speak to even the people I think are worth talking to.



Did brilliantly well then screwed up 11 months ago

I went ballroom dancing like I usually do every week and I met a new guy at the table I was sitting at. Usually I don’t talk to the other people very much but this time I started talking to him about his job and his life and we ended up getting along very well. All those books on how to make people like you have really paid off.

Then the YMCA song came on and I told him that I loved the song and jumped up and went and danced. I think I sent the wrong message to him when I did that and I think he thought I was gay. For the rest of the night he was telling me how beautiful the girls were and he didn’t really talk to me much after that.

I’m just glad I was able to initiate a conversation for a change.



Johan van der Merwe has gotten 6 cheers on this goal.

 

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