This week's Berkeley meetup will be a structured discussion about getting better at skills. One way to get better at skills (like aikido) is deliberate practice. Another way to get better at skills (like making friends) is deliberate performance, which is what you do when practicing isn't an option. (If you meet an especially cool person, you don't want to try your risky bold untested friend-getting technique, because you actually want to make friends with them.) Very generally, the tools are

• making predictions
• experimenting
• analyzing what happened
• doing post-mortems on near-misses
• getting experts to critique your technique

This is horribly abstract; at the meetup we'll have a structured discussion about how this could actually work in practice, and what we have been actually doing to become skilled. You don't have to read these linked articles to attend the meetup,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deliberate_practice

http://peterfadde.com/Research/Deliberate_Performance-PI-1011.pdf

but if you've read this book I really hope you attend:

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbooks-Psychology/dp/0521600812

Doors open at 7pm, and the meetup begins at 7:30pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png