I'm socially awkward and after reading lots of books on this topic I've come to realize that social skills are just that, skills. You get better at social situa

I'm socially awkward and after reading lots of books on this topic I've come to realize that social skills are just that, skills. You get better at social situations the more time you spend in them. You'll never get good at them by sitting at a computer reading books about how to get good at them. Most of us geeks do not have social skills because we haven't spent as much time as 'normal' people interacting with others. I have spent thousands of hours on computers, time I could have spent doing things with other human beings. Instead of being great at interacting with others, I'm predictably good at interacting with computers. There is no shortcut for gaining social skills[0], and no book is going to solve all of our 'problems', or even a quarter of them. I'd say if you read a book on better friendships or public speaking and this improves your skills by 3% then it must have been a truly fantastic book. The only solution is for us to engage in a lot of interactions with others, if for some reason we deem it worthy of our time. For example, if a guy is terribly shy during business lunches, the only solution is for him to keep throwing himself into that situation again and again. After 100 or 200, or 1000 lunches most of his business lunch awkwardness will have gone away. But is getting better at interacting with people worth the time we could have spent getting better at interacting with computers[1]? Maybe for some[2]. [0] None that I have found. [1] Through learning more about a programming language or an OS, etc. [2] For example if you decide to choose a career that greatly depends on effective human interaction.