This is an article hypothetically written to my younger self, as if I were just going to start on my path of preparation. These are lessons I spent a couple decades learning. So, this is for you, young man. Things I’ve learned, what I’d do if I were in your shoes:
Social Skills Are the Primary Prepping Skills
Not guns. Not gardening. Not bushcraft. Social skills. Social Skills are the single most important skill you need. It will affect your career and therefore your resources and your preps. It will affect your mate options. It will affect your children. It will affect your sanity itself. You need to be able to get along with other human beings and join a healthy community. And odds are if you’re on this site you struggle a bit with that. At least I know I did as a young man here.
You don’t get to decide if you’re a person other people want to be around. They do. “No response” is a response, a negative one that’s easy to miss. At a certain point people stop trying to help you. I know at least two people who do not realize how off-putting they are. They do not realize that they are being excluded and avoided and if I told them it would not change anything. So I don’t. They’re intelligent. They are right about many things. People can’t out-argue them. So why does no one want to be around them? Why can’t they find a husband or wife? It is as simple as “they have poor social skills”.
You might be okay with those costs. You might be so valuable that you are paid in spite of your poor social skills. You might have made peace with not having a spouse and with having few friends. The final cost though is your sanity itself. There is no such thing as a lone sane person. Teddy Roosevelt in his book Hunting the Grisly said that a lone hunter in the wilderness “leads a life of such lonely isolation as to insure his individual characteristics developing into peculiarities” Even the hardest core criminals put into solitary go insane. It’s not a question of toughness. We need society as much as we need food. Aristotle said the man by himself must be a god or a monster. We are not gods but we certainly can be monsters. And the only way out is through social skills.
Importantly, people with poor social skills often comfort themselves with how well they would do in another world. If only there were magic. If only there were zombies. If only the balloon went up… If only. There’s a nugget of truth in it. Part of what attracts people to prepping is that they see beneath the social reality while others are unable to step out of it to look at the hard realities under it. But if you spend too long looking at the hard realities, you run the danger of ignoring the social reality as frivolous instead of as important. Make no mistake it is important. Your ability to navigate the social world is as important as your ability navigate the city or forest. There are people who see beneath like you do AND have good social skills. They will outperform you and likely won’t want you around. Social skills will matter in the “if only” world too. Hopefully that convinces you that you need to improve in this area. First, read Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. It’s not as hokey as it sounds; it has legitimately earned its status as a classic read.
Second, look at improvisational (“improv”) acting. “Yes and” is the key rule not just to improv but conversation. There are more advanced levels where you learn to say “no” without saying “no” but right now, to improve we start with “yes and”. Finally, look into magic. Slight of hand is more about hacking normal social programming than super quick movement. If you learn how magicians surf attention and manipulate you will be better able to swim in conversation.
Develop your social sense, you’re going to need it. You have one, the same way you have the same muscle set as Mr Olympia. The difference is development. You don’t need to be Mr Olympia but you need to be better than you are.
Communication is the second most important prep
What more boring stuff? Yes. What good is knowing the correct answer if you cannot communicate it? Not just broadcast it, I mean successfully communicate. Plenty of people say things and it doesn’t matter at all.
We all feel the failure of communication at one point or another. “The curse of Cassandra” feels true for all of us. We have not angered the gods and actually been cursed as she was in the legend. We can improve our ability to communicate. Bet on that. You can improve.
Two things hammered the importance of this to me: one was an offhand comment in seminar I was watching and one was from a book. These are both centered on writing and that’s where I want to focus here. In person communication is also important and largely covered by the social skills section. Writing will haunt you your entire life. Most of your writing will be emails but also longer pieces will be important everywhere.
The offhand comment was from Dennis Prager in the Exodus Seminar. He noted that “writing is a mirror of the mind”. He argued that disordered or unclear writing corresponds with disordered and unclear thinking. I still feel that’s not entirely fair, I can discourse better than I can write; however, it is more true than not. Peterson added on to that that writing IS thinking in his view. And there’s much truth in that as well. There is something to the externality of writing. Things that seem clear and good in your head sometimes look bad on the page.
Rarely have I found the reverse to be true.
The book was about the Battle of Gallipoli. I was struck by how clear and wise the orders sent from England to the fleet were. Although there was still willful misunderstanding and unforeseen complications, the good orders showed absolutely brilliant communication and writing ability. The orders were clear in what they were requiring while still giving enough leeway to respond to the unknown. That level of insight and understanding conveyed in those clear and concise orders is amazing.
Taken together I think those points really capture the soul of writing. Write in order to think. Get it out of your head and onto paper. Look at your mind in the mirror. Then review it and pull out the thoughts that good. Condense and edit it down to something worth saying. Your final product should be something that “treats the reader’s time as more valuable than yours” and they find worth reading.
I’ve made a habit of writing a reflection piece on any major event I experience. Any experience that is new and major I write about. Often I take notes during but invariably I write about it afterwards. By typing it all out and reading it back I remember the lessons better. I am always surprised that typing it out brings me realizations that were lurking beneath the surface before I typed it. Without the writing they would have evaporated into the ether. Some of those writings became contest entries. Some were shared with friends. Some languish in my hard drive. All made me a slightly wiser person.
Beyond that I’ll offer 3 pieces of advice to help you become a better writer. I’m no Stephen King but I will still share the pieces of advice that I think have helped me.
First: Assume that the problem lies in you, not your audience. Is that always true? Of course not. Will you be a better communicator if you assume that? Yes. And that is by far more important than being technically correct. You didn’t accomplish your goal therefore you need to change to do so.
Second: Find someone whose writing you admire and emulate it.
Third: We get to great writing by deleting the good, mediocre, and poor writing from our initial piece. Most of writing is editing. A great short story is a novella ruthelessly edited. A great novel was a good duology cut to size. A great trilogy was a five-novel series that’s had all the fat cut from it. Write. Get it out. Then edit ruthlessly. Bonus: practice being pithy.
Self-Defense
Finally a cool subject! Except it’s not. Rory Miller was the one who taught me that Self Defense is not a technique, practice, or art; it’s a legal concept. A punch is a technique. The legal system is what will determine if that was self defense, a misdemeanor, or a felony. There really aren’t any other options. This means that self-defense winds up being another application of social skills and communication.
I hated that fact as a young man. It wasn’t until a close run in with a social parasite as a father that I realized: “yes, I would have won that fight…and when the cops came and found a bloodied broken man in the play area I probably would have been the one taken to jail”. It was a close call, I had a full adrenalin dump, tunnel vision, the whole nine yards. I was reasonably competent and I stayed well within legal lines. Despite that, I look back and say that if the conflict had escalated into a physical fight it would have ended badly for me legally because my social skills were not up to snuff.
Self defense occurs when the legal system adjudicates that it was self defense instead of criminal. It is not enough to be innocent, you must demonstrate that you are innocent. You must interface well with the agents of the legal system which are of an ambivalent nature for you. If you trust the cops completely you’ll likely fail. If you are antagonistic with the cops you’ll likely fail. You must demonstrate that you were both reasonable and innocent while dealing with the worst hormonal and adrenal dumps you’ve ever had along with the worst social pressure/bullying from authority that you’ve ever experienced. That’s real self defense.
The fact that self defense is social will endure beyond the balloon going up. The community’s adjudication process (the posse, the committee of vigilance) will appear again as soon as there are more than two families interacting. That rougher, faster form of justice will have even less wiggle room. Looking guilty will be enough for execution and there will not be resources to hold and feed you while an exhaustive trial is argued back and forth with professional arguers and expert witnesses. Understand: use of force will always be a legal and social matter and your social skills will decide the day. The oddball standing on technicality will fail. The socially adept community member will prevail.
(To be concluded tomorrow, in Part 2.)
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