90 Strangers in 30 Days: Introduction and Rules

ANDREW ELSASS

Project Rules

This post was from a 30-day social experiment I did as a way to try and improve my social skills. Also check out the project hub pagepost-project recapfive biggest takeaways, frequently asked questions, the original reddit post, and the subsequent TEDx Talk.  

 

About four months ago, I moved to a new city.

While I have met a fair amount of people simply by pursuing the things I am interested in and through Meetup.com, I can’t help but wonder. . .what would happen to my social life if I made a deliberate and consistent effort to meet even more people?

Over the past few years, I’ve become borderline obsessed with how I can improve my social skills. On a couple of breakthrough nights out, I’ve been able to work myself up to what pick up artists call being ‘in state’, which is a feeling of complete independence from the outcomes of your interactions, as well as complete non-reactiveness to your environment (in the sense that you don’t let your surroundings determine your mood).

Basically, you feel bulletproof, are ‘in the zone’, and have complete control of every interaction you enter. Every comment thrown at you elicits an unconscious yet witty and fun comment back, and you are ‘just being’. It’s also one of the best highs I have ever experienced.

So in addition to just generally meeting more awesome people, I would like to see if I can reach this state more often, faster, and better overcome negative stimuli in both my environment and in my head. And finally, I want to blast away the remaining social anxiety I have, especially that which rears its ugly head when I stay in my comfort zone for days or weeks at a time and don’t force myself to talk anyone except those I am most comfortable around.

That’s why, for the next 30 days, I am going to go out every single day and initiate three interactions with people I don’t know.

While I have already become relatively decent at making cold small talk with random people that cross my path in everyday life, I am curious what would happen to both my ability in this regard and to my social life if I applied this skill set consistently, every single day, for an entire month.

The rules:

  1. I must go out every day in June 2013 and attempt to initiate three conversations with people I have never met. These people can be at bars, coffee shops, on the street, in the grocery, wherever.

  2. For an attempt to count, I must speak at least once after my initial greeting or ‘opener’ after the other person responds.

  3. Cashiers, bartenders or other ‘required’ interactions do not count.

  4. I cannot open a conversation simply by telling the person about the experiment.

  5. Every interaction must be logged.

  6. This project can’t impede with any of my regularly scheduled activities (writing, CrossFit, swing dancing, etc.)

And except for weekends and the occasional weeknight, I also aim to do the majority of this without the use of alcohol.

Changes I predict or hope to see in myself:

  1. Increased ability to initiate conversations even more effortlessly, without having to psyche myself up first. In fact, by Day 30 I expect this to be to an almost unconscious act.

  2. Be able to slip into ‘state’ even when I am tired or not ‘feeling it’. I am sure there will be many days where going out and talking to people is the very last thing I want to do.

  3. Make at least five friends who I would be comfortable enough texting on a whim to go and grab a drink.

  4. Grow even thicker skin regarding the opinions of others towards me.

  5. Vanquish the remaining threads of approach anxiety that I have.

  6. Become so comfortable around ‘strangers’ that I unwittingly make a few people uncomfortable.

  7. Decrease the number ‘fucks given’ when an interaction bombs.

  8. Get better at remembering names.

  9. Improve at moving conversations past the ‘trivial small talk’ stage into much more meaningful interactions, quicker.

What happens if I fail?

If I fail, $100 of mine will be donated to the American Crossroads (it was a toss-up between this and a few other ‘anti-charities’, including those on the other side of the aisle) through sticK.com, an amazing site that helps you reach your goals by creating incentive-driven commitment contracts. A good friend and co-worker will be serving as ‘referee’, and will be compiling my log into a spreadsheet, which I will share when all is said and done.

The worst-case scenario is I’m out $100 in exchange for a weird story to tell someday, but maybe I’ll even learn a thing or two about how and how not to make friends. The best-case scenario is that my social skills evolve beyond recognition and I meet a bunch of awesome people just by talking to whomever I happen to cross paths with that day.

Let’s begin!

Want to try 90 Strangers in 30 Days for yourself?

Surround Yourself

Living well is the best revenge.

Ever been on the wrong side of that truism?

When you hear (or see on Facebook) that someone you don’t particularly care for is doing really, really well for themselves?

This used to give me a pit in the bottom of the stomach and make me question my life, all because someone I put in a box had escaped.

Eventually I realized that I needed this feeling, that it was actually a good thing. I no longer let it consume me, but instead let it feed me and my drive. I began to seek it out, to crave it.

As the saying goes, when you smile, the world smiles with you. And when the world around you is doing great things, the more inclined you are to do the same. The status quo has been raised. The new norm is one of higher expectations. If you are the sum of the five people spend the most time with, complacency and contentment are easy if you hang around with five underachievers.

Seeking out and surrounding myself with people and literature that made me question my own worth and contributions to the world were the beat that finally brought my creative heart back to life a few years ago.

As someone with an extremely addictive personality, a trend I have observed in myself is that once I get a small taste of a subject that is new and intriguing to me, I instantly want to know everything about it. Consequently, this sends me on an information binge that lasts anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Then, once I am satiated or the novelty wears off, I move on to the next interesting topic.

When this moving on doesn’t happen, and that satiation point is never reached, that’s when I know I have struck gold, and found a true passion, not just a fleeting one.

That is the case with me and a few areas of interest (and most people have them), particularly in material that provokes thinking differently and that inspires creative action.

A trend I used to see in myself and others regarding motivation was that it would be more of a fleeting kind of inspiration than a ‘true’ one. We would be fired up for a short period of time, then fade back into uninspired ‘normalcy’.

Then slowly, I got good at evolving this energy from sporadic to perpetual.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I see when I exit my bedroom is my productivity calendar (post on that coming soon). Across the top of my bathroom mirror are the words ‘Perfection is Boring’ in dry-erase marker. Adorning my kitchen mirror are a few of my fitness personal records next to the words ‘Wolves don’t lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.’ Opening the door to my refrigerator requires my eyes to scan past one of my favorite quotes of all-time. In my car, checking how much gas I have left brings me to a taped-up fortune that I pulled from a cookie years ago- ‘Today’s action becomes tomorrow habit.’ When I check my phone, a giant marshmallow as my background reminds me of a particular famous study.

None of this was planned- I didn’t wake up one day and think to myself, “I need to cover every surface I look at in a given day with motivation.” It just happened, organically, piece by piece.

While these kinds of things can of course become empty and cliché through frequent viewing (the reason why I would never get something similar tattooed on me), these triggers I have placed throughout my daily life are reminders to myself about why I am alive, why I get up at 6 a.m. to write everyday, why I moved away from the majority of my friends and family for a job that will allow me to reach my goals, why I strive to learn everyday, and why my RSS Feed is loaded with blogs that teach and inspire me.

They are anchors to remind me of what I love most- creating. My daily environment is set up so that it’s literally impossible for me to forget this fact.

It’s also a suitable (and reliable) substitute for constantly having to seek out people that have accomplished things that I am envious of.

If my mind begins to wander, these triggers bring it back to the focus.

To be inspired and bursting with ideas you must get down on paper, to me, is one the most amazing feelings there is. Hence why I am addicted to it.

So, how do you surround yourself and keep the fire going?

Put another way by Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan:

“That’s what you need man. If you don’t have that in your life, you gotta find it. Either surround yourself with friends who do it, go to TED.com, do whatever you have to do man, find it, it’s out there, and the beautiful thing about technology – and this is for young people – is that you can spend your time listening to music and reading about what Lady Gaga wore to the gym, or you can open up your mind to a whole world out there.”

“There’s an instinct to protect yourself by bullshitting yourself and becoming jealous and bitter and talking shit about that [successful] person, and that’s where haters come from. 100% of haters in the world are unrealized potential.”