Social skills are an intrinsic part of being a living human being. Having a conversation with someone is just a normal part of life. Problems arise because of the way you percieve yourself in the world, and the way you percieve everyone else. If you have been brought up in a negative environment, and have learnt at an early age for example that people in general aren't to be trusted, then you grow up as a less socially effective person. An experiment was carried out on infants in the 70's to see whether their attachment to their mother had any effect on their sociability. They observed their behaviour at 15 months, and then at 3 and a half years, and found that securely attached children were much more sociable than insecurely attached ones. So, the way I see it, it's not a lack of social skills that causes a person to be introverted, or anti sociable or whatever, it's the actual inability to learn these social skills, because of that persons perception of the world, and of themselves. You can't tell a socially inable person to go out and learn social skills, when their head is so fucked up that they think the rest of the world is against them. It would be like sending Woody allen into the ring with evander hollyfield. I'm pretty sure, in fact i'm positive that there are plenty of guys that join this community who are completely fucked up inside, and because all they hear is approach, approach approach, then when they do approach and get blown out like nobodies business, then they go home and feel like the world has ended, no where near better off but much worse off. For these people, there's a mountain to climb within before they need to start looking at how to learn "social skills", which by the way are way over complicated a lot of the time. For these people, acceptance of themselves and the world around them is fundamental to becoming a more socially able person, not learning how to make people laugh or influence people into liking them with words.