Daniel Wendler - Level Up Your Social Life: The Gamers Guide To Social Success

In some video games you can level up just by reading a book, but real life doesnt work that way. In real life, you need to practice if you want to get better at something.

Thats what the quests are for. The more quests you complete, the faster youll reach your social goals.

But be careful. If you start too many quests at once, youll be overwhelmed. If you start quests too slowly, you wont make much progress.

To strike the right balance, I recommend the following strategy:

• Start a new collection quest when you finish the last collection quest

• Start a new daily quest each week

• Start a new weekly quest every other week (so you should have two active each month.)

In other words, you should usually be working on one collection quest, one daily quest, and two weekly quests at a time. Thats four quests total, which is challenging but doable.

Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. You might find that you prefer to do more or less at a time. Or you might find that you can do a lot of easy quests at once, but need to slow down when a hard quest comes along. If you feel challenged but confident you can handle it, youre probably doing the right amount. Basically, think of it like the difficulty setting on a video gameif youre getting creamed, make it easier. If youre sailing through without a challenge, make it harder.

You should also try to track your quest progress. Its a hassle, but if you track your progress, youre much more likely to succeed. A few options for tracking quests:

• Pen and paper (especially if you tape it up somewhere you see it every day)

• A spreadsheet

• Todoist.com

• HabitRPG.com

I recommend setting aside a certain time each day for updating your quest progress. For instance, you might give yourself five minutes during breakfast or dinner to review your current quests, update your progress, and perhaps re-read a tip from the guide. This might sound like a lot of work, but once it becomes a habit it will feel effortless. Plus, daily checkups will make you much more likely to success with your social goals.

This is not going to be easy.

Im going to ask you to change. Im going to ask you to grow. Im going to ask you to fail, again and again until you learn to succeed.

But I promise you, it will be worth it.

It was for me.

When I was growing up, I was the nerdiest, most awkward kid you could ever hope to meet. My comfort zone began and ended with my Super Nintendo, and my social abilities were limited to 1) talking about Star Wars 2) talking about video games and 3) talking about Star Wars video games.

In high school, I was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, a condition that makes it much harder for me to learn social skills naturally. So I decided to learn them deliberately, like I was studying a foreign language. At that point, it was about survival more than anything. I just wanted to stop the teasing.