Cold calling is one of the easier social skills. Write yourself a script with if then branches and read the thing when you get someone on the phone. You can wri

Cold calling is one of the easier social skills. Write yourself a script with if then branches and read the thing when you get someone on the phone. You can write the scripts such that the questions you ask are reasonably close-ended and then write if then branches like a program. That's what I did when I used to do door to door sales. You've got the time to plan, the person you're calling doesn't - you can offload a lot of the usual needs to be good at socialising by planning. You can even use technical aids if you don't need to be near the person you're talking to. Make yourself a little program that notes changes in tone of voice, for instance. And then feed that into your plan's conditionals. IME, the anxiety drops off after you've called on a few hundred people. I'm not sure how that would work if you've got severe social anxiety though. That sounds like something it might be worth going to therapy or the like to deal with. After all, working with others is a pretty vital skill almost regardless of what you want to get done. But I can't comment on how to address the difficulties of that, not being a psychologist or having it myself. # The more general point as to whether to focus on your strengths or weaknesses. Three things spring to mind: 1) You need a wide familiarity with multiple areas to judge experts in those areas and to see how the things you're good at can be used to address them. It's usually worth investing enough in your areas of weakness, if you expect to run across a situation where they'd be relevant, to bring the skills up to a basic level of functionality. 2) You'll probably never be as good in that area as someone who loves it and getting to a deep level of knowledge requires considerable sacrifices in other areas. You can probably rent the strengths you need and be stronger that way than either of you would be alone. 3) I don't know I'd be focusing on talent as much as I would passion. Effort trumps intelligence for most things. I've known some very smart failures in a wide range of areas. This week it'll be one thing, next week it'll be another. Since they don't sit down and do the work, since they're not really passionate about the work, just the idea of what they'll have at the end, it never comes to anything. They're not creators, they're just slightly smarter dreamers. To be a creator is to create. Just as to be a programmer is to program, or to be an (almost) anything is to practice that anything.