I started this project in order to hopefully reach an a-ha moment that would allow me to realize what I'm doing wrong and therefore cure my shitty social skills.
I've typically understood that social skills are really hard to pick from books and implement it in real life. The main reason is that the time-scale on which you react in social situations is extremely short and insufficient for you to invoke the theory you learned. The books can be very helpful if you have a lot of social interactions and then use the theory to clarify and find patterns in all the data and then try to change a small pattern at a time.
Any rate, that's just me. It might work different for you.
Everyone tells me that, but in my experience the reverse is true.
Intuitively, your claim makes sense. There's so much nuance in human communication that it would be impossible to learn even a fraction of it from a book. For example, let's say you have a slightly politically incorrect joke you want to tell. How do you know if it's an appropriate time to say it? There are so many variables that have to be plugged into this function - number of people around you, closeness of the people to you, closeness of the people to each other, your own delivery, each p...
This is the supposedly-bimonthly-but-we-missed-April-and-June-2013 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines: