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Quiet by Susan Cain

Quiet by Susan Cain

by Parker · 194 things on Twos

The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Introduction
Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race.
Introversions cousins are sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness
Talkative people are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends.
She was an introvert, and as such she had unique powers in negotiation—perhaps less obvious but no less formidable. She’d probably prepared more than everyone else. She had a quiet but firm speaking style. She rarely spoke without thinking. Being mild-mannered, she could take strong, even aggressive, positions while coming across as perfectly reasonable. And she tended to ask questions—lots of them—and actually listen to the answers, which, no matter what your personality, is crucial to strong negotiation.
Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves. Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don’t socialize enough.
Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase” for rewards like money and status. Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame.
Extroverts are the people who will add life to your dinner party and laugh generously at your jokes. They tend to be assertive, dominant, and in great need of company. Extroverts think out loud and on their feet; they prefer talking to listening, rarely find themselves at a loss for words, and occasionally blurt out things they never meant to say. They’re comfortable with conflict, but not with solitude. Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.
The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope. Introverts can be these things, but most are perfectly friendly.
Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not.
Some psychologists map the two tendencies on vertical and horizontal axes, with the introvert-extrovert spectrum on the horizontal axis, and the anxious-stable spectrum on the vertical. With this model, you end up with four quadrants of personality types: calm extroverts, anxious (or impulsive) extroverts, calm introverts, and anxious introverts.
“There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.” - Carl Jung
That’s OK. Take what applies to you, and use the rest to improve your relationships with others.
Part One: The Extrovert Ideal
Chapter 1: The Rise of the "Mighty Likeable Fellow"
How Extroversion Became the Cultural Ideal
"Strangers’ eyes, keen and critical. Can you meet them proudly—confidently—without fear?" - Print advertisement for Woodbury's Soap, 1922
“Respect for individual human personality has with us reached its lowest point and it is delightfully ironical that no nation is so constantly talking about personality as we are. We actually have schools for ‘self-expression’ and ‘self-development,’ although we seem usually to mean the expression and development of the personality of a successful real estate agent.”
The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.
Chapter 2: The Myth of Charismatic Leadership
The Culture of Personality, a Hundred Years Later
Knowledge is useless until it’s coupled with action.
The better we feel, the better we can sell ourselves.
The thing about Tony—and what draws people to buy his products—is that like any good salesman, he believes in what he’s pitching.
The essence of the HBS education is that leaders have to act confidently and make decisions in the face of incomplete information.
If you speak firmly on the basis of bad information, you can lead your people into disaster. But if you exude uncertainty, then morale suffers, funders won’t invest, and your organization can collapse.
The CEO may not know the best way forward, but she has to act anyway.
Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only fifty-five percent, say it as if you believe it a hundred percent.
Don’t think about the perfect answer. It’s better to get out there and say something than to never get your voice in.
In China there was more emphasis on listening, on asking questions rather than holding forth, on putting others’ needs first. In the United States, he feels, conversation is about how effective you are at turning your experiences into stories, whereas a Chinese person might be concerned with taking up too much of the other person’s time with inconsequential information.
Verbal fluency and sociability are the two most important predictors of success, according to a Stanford Business School study.
We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate.
“It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Well, why is that? They’re valuable traits, but we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.”
When he analyzed what the highest-performing companies had in common, the nature of their CEOs jumped out at him. Every single one of them was led by an unassuming man like Darwin Smith. Those who worked with these leaders tended to describe them with the following words: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated.
We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.
People followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.
“Connecting people to fix the world over time is the deepest spiritual value you can have.” - Craig Newmark
Introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online that their family and friends would be surprised to read, to say that they can express the “real me” online, and to spend more time in certain kinds of online discussions.
Religious leaders from Jesus to Buddha, as well as the lesser-known saints, monks, shamans, and prophets, have always gone off alone to experience the revelations they later shared with the rest of us.
Chapter 3: When Collaboration Kills Creativity
The Rise of the New Groupthink and the Power of Working Alone
“I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork ... for well I know that in order to attain any definite goal, it is imperative that one person do the thinking and the commanding.” - Albert Einstein
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.” - Steve Wozniak
Introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation.
“Introversion concentrates the mind on the tasks in hand, and prevents the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.” - Hans Eysenck
If solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite.
The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done.
In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them.
Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.”
First, Steve Wozniak was motivated: his father, a Lockheed engineer, had taught Woz that engineers could change people’s lives and were “among the key people in the world.” Second, he built his expertise step by painstaking step.
“I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I’m serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all those projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book.... I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.” - Steve Wozniak
Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.”
Top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.
Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases cortisol, the body’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others.
A recent study found that people learn better after a quiet stroll through the woods than after a noisy walk down a city street.
A study of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors, found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity.
What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.
If personal space is vital to creativity, so is freedom from “peer pressure.”
Brainstorming had four rules:
Don’t judge or criticize ideas.
Be freewheeling. The wilder the idea, the better.
Go for quantity. The more ideas you have, the better.
Build on the ideas of fellow group members.
Group brainstorming doesn’t actually work.
The men in twenty-three of the twenty-four groups produced more ideas when they worked on their own than when they worked as a group. They also produced ideas of equal or higher quality when working individually.
Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it performs.
Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one’s peers.
An audience may be rousing, but it’s also stressful.
The most effective teams are composed of a healthy mix of introverts and extroverts, studies show, and so are many leadership structures.
We also need to create settings in which people are free to circulate in a shifting kaleidoscope of interactions, and to disappear into their private workspaces when they want to focus or simply be alone.
It’s also vital to recognize that many people—especially introverts like Steve Wozniak—need extra quiet and privacy in order to do their best work.
Part Two: Your Biology, Your Self?
Chapter 4: Is Temperament Destiny?
Nature, Nurture, and the Orchid Hypothesis
Psychologists often discuss the difference between “temperament” and “personality.” Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix.
Kagan hypothesized that infants born with an especially excitable amygdala would wiggle and howl when shown unfamiliar objects—and grow up to be children who were more likely to feel vigilant when meeting new people. And this is just what he found.
All kids notice their environments and feel emotions, of course, but high-reactive kids seem to see and feel things more.
Every behavior has more than one cause. Don’t ever forget that! For every child who’s slow to warm up, yes, there will be statistically more high-reactives, but you can be slow to warm up because of how you spent the first three and a half years of your life
Jay Belsky describes a high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who “can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.”
Chapter 5: Beyond Temperament
The Role of Free Will (and the Secret of Public Speaking for Introverts)
“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the per- son’s capacity to act.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Free will can take us far, suggests Dr. Schwartz’s research, but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits.
There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.
Chapter 6: “Franklin Was A Politician, But Eleanor Spoke Out Of Conscience”
Why Cool Is Overrated
“A shy man no doubt dreads the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them. He may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence about trifles in the presence of strangers.” - Charles Darwin
If you’re thinking in more complicated ways, then talking about the weather or where you went for the holidays is not quite as interesting as talking about values or morality.
“I think people who are shy remain shy always, but they learn how to overcome it.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
“Functional, moderate guilt may promote future altruism, personal responsibility, adaptive behavior in school, and harmonious, competent, and prosocial relationships with parents, teachers, and friends.” - Grazyna Kochanska
If Dacher Keltner had to choose his mate by asking a single question at a speed-dating event, the question he would choose is: “What was your last embarrassing experience?” Then he would watch very carefully for lip- presses, blushing, and averted eyes. “The elements of the embarrassment are fleeting statements the individual makes about his or her respect for the judgment of others,” he writes. “Embarrassment reveals how much the individual cares about the rules that bind us to one another.”
You want to make sure that your spouse cares what other people think. It’s better to mind too much than to mind too little.
The same traits that make a nomad fierce enough to hunt and to defend livestock against raiders may hinder more sedentary activities like farming, selling goods at the market, or focusing at school.
Human extroverts have more sex partners than introverts do—a boon to any species wanting to reproduce itself—but they commit more adultery and divorce more frequently, which is not a good thing for the children of all those couplings.
Extroverts exercise more, but introverts suffer fewer accidents and traumatic injuries.
Sensitive people tend to speak softly because that’s how they prefer others to communicate with them.
Chapter 7: Why Did Wall Street Crash And Warren Buffett Prosper?
How Introverts and Extroverts Think (and Process Dopamine) Differently
A reward-sensitive person is highly motivated to seek rewards—from a promotion to a lottery jackpot to an enjoy- able evening out with friends. Reward sensitivity motivates us to pursue goals like sex and money, social status and influence. It prompts us to climb ladders and reach for faraway branches in order to gather life’s choicest fruits.
The introverts are much better at making a plan, staying with a plan, being very disciplined.
Extroverts socialize because human connection is inherently gratifying.
Extroverts tend to experience more pleasure and excitement than introverts do.
Extroverts’ dopamine pathways appear to be more active than those of introverts.
Introverts will be drawn from time to time to sex, and parties, and status, but the kick they get will be relatively small, so they are not going to break a leg to get there. In short, introverts just don’t buzz as easily.
People with a variant of a serotonin-regulating gene linked to introversion and sensitivity take 28 percent less financial risk than others.
Introverts have also been found to outperform their peers when playing gambling games calling for sophisticated decision-making.
Introverts also seem to be better than extroverts at delaying gratification, a crucial life skill associated with everything from higher SAT scores and income to lower body mass index.
FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
Introverts are “geared to inspect” and extroverts “geared to respond.”
The longer you pause to process surprising or negative feedback, the more likely you are to learn from it.
Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately. Intro- verts and extroverts also direct their attention differently: if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the fu- ture. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while their introverted peers are asking “what if.”
Introverts sometimes outperform extroverts even on social tasks that require persistence. The extroverts would make these wonderful calls, but then a shiny object of some kind would cross their paths and they’d lose focus. The introverts, in contrast, would talk very quietly, but boom, boom, boom, they were making those calls. They were focused and determined.
If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent. We love its flash and dazzle. But great power lies in the other ninety-nine percent.
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s that I stay with problems longer.” - Albert Einstein
Flow is an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity. In a state of flow, you’re neither bored nor anxious, and you don’t question your own adequacy. Hours pass without your noticing.
The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings.
Flow often occurs, he writes, in conditions in which people become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.
“Psychological theories usually assume that we are motiv- ated either by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear, or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige. But in flow, a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
If you’re an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts. You have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clearsightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. You enjoy relative freedom from the temptations of superficial prizes like money and status. Indeed, your biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths. You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you un- dervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you. But when you’re focused on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless.
“Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.” - Warren Buffett
Part Three: Do All Cultures Have An Extrovert Ideal?
Chapter 8: Soft Power
Asian-Americans and the Extrovert Ideal
“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“If I have a choice between doing something for myself, like going out with my friends, or staying home and studying, I think of my parents. That gives me the strength to keep studying. My father tells me that his job is computer programming, and my job is to study.” - Mike Wei
The Americans emphasize sociability and prize those attributes that make for easy, cheerful association. The Chinese emphasize deeper attributes, focusing on moral virtues and achievement.
“The wind howls, but the mountain re- mains still.” - Japanese Proverb
“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” - Lao Zi
Individuals in Asia see themselves as part of a greater whole—whether family, corporation, or community—and place tremendous value on harmony within their group. They often subordinate their own desires to the group’s interests, accepting their place in its hierarchy.
Western culture is organized around the individual. We see ourselves as self-contained units; our destiny is to express ourselves, to fol- low our bliss, to be free of undue restraint, to achieve the one thing that we, and we alone, were brought into this world to do. We may be gregarious, but we don’t submit to group will, or at least we don’t like to think we do.
If you don’t have charisma you can be the most brilliant person in the world and you’ll still be disrespected.
This pattern—the decision to accept what another man would challenge—occurred again and again in Gandhi’s life.
Satyagraha, the term he coined to mean “firmness in pursuit of truth.”
Gandhi’s passivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way.
“I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. A thoughtless word hardly ever escaped my tongue or pen. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.” - Mahatma Gandhi
Excellent students seem not only to possess the cognitive ability to solve math and science problems, but also to have a useful personality characteristic: quiet persistence.
Part Four: How To Love, How To Work
Chapter 9: When Should You Act More Extroverted Than You Really Are?
“A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.” - William James
People who are “rejection-sensitive” are warm and loving when they feel secure, hostile and controlling when they feel rejected.
Our lives are dramatically enhanced when we’re involved in core personal projects that we consider meaningful, manageable, and not unduly stressful, and that are supported by others. When someone asks us “How are things?” we may give a throwaway answer, but our true response is a function of how well our core personal projects are going.
At first blush, Free Trait Theory seems to run counter to a cherished piece of our cultural heritage. Shakespeare’s oft-quoted advice, “To thine own self be true,” runs deep in our philosophical DNA. Many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of taking on a “false” persona for any length of time. And if we act out of character by convincing ourselves that our pseudoself is real, we can eventually burn out without even knowing why. The genius of Little’s theory is how neatly it resolves this discomfort. Yes, we are only pretending to be extroverts, and yes, such inauthenticity can be morally ambiguous (not to mention exhausting), but if it’s in the service of love or a professional calling, then we’re doing just as Shakespeare advised.
Studies show that taking simple physical steps—like smiling—makes us feel stronger and happier, while frowning makes us feel worse.
First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not.
Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to.
Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.
We would all be better off if, before accepting a new job, we evaluated the presence or absence of restorative niches as carefully as we consider the family leave policy or health insurance plans. Introverts should ask themselves: Will this job allow me to spend time on in-character activities like, for example, reading, strategizing, writing, and researching? Will I have a private workspace or be subject to the constant demands of an open office plan? If the job doesn’t give me enough restorative niches, will I have enough free time on evenings and weekends to grant them to myself?
A Free Trait Agreement acknowledges that we’ll each act out of character some of the time—in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time.
Chapter 10: The Communication Gap
How to Talk to Members of the Opposite Type
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” - Carl Jung
Your degree of extroversion seems to influence how many friends you have, in other words, but not how good a friend you are.
Big Five traits: Introversion-Extroversion; Agreeableness; Openness to Experience; Conscientiousness; and Emotional Stability. (Many personality psychologists believe that human personality can be boiled down to these five characteristics.)
The students whose relationships were freest of conflict had high scores for agreeableness. Agreeable people are warm, supportive, and loving; personality psychologists have found that if you sit them down in front of a computer screen of words, they focus longer than others do on words like caring, console, and help, and a shorter time on words like abduct, assault, and harass. Introverts and extroverts are equally likely to be agreeable; there is no correlation between extroversion and agreeableness.
This was a painfully common dynamic in the introvert-extrovert couples I interviewed: the introverts desperately craving downtime and understanding from their partners, the extroverts longing for company, and resentful that others seemed to benefit from their partners’ “best” selves.
It can be hard for extroverts to understand how badly introverts need to recharge at the end of a busy day. We all empathize with a sleep-deprived mate who comes home from work too tired to talk, but it’s harder to grasp that social overstimulation can be just as exhausting.
It’s also hard for introverts to understand just how hurtful their silence can be.
Introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compete with.
Introverted patients responded better and interacted longer with robots that were designed to speak in a soothing, gentle manner: “I know it is hard, but remember that it’s for your own good,” and, “Very nice, keep up the good work.” Extroverts, on the other hand, worked harder for robots that used more bracing, aggressive language: “You can do more than that, I know it!” and “Concentrate on your exercise!”
“I told you not to bite,” said the swami, “but I did not tell you not to hiss.”
And what Jennifer is trying to say, underneath her freight-train words, is often quite simple: Respect me. Pay attention to me. Love me.
They found that the extroverts were a lot more accurate than the introverts in assessing whether their partner liked talking to them. These findings suggest that extroverts are better at decoding social cues than introverts.
Extroverts are sociable because their brains are good at handling competing demands on their attention—which is just what dinner- party conversation involves. In contrast, introverts often feel repelled by social events that force them to attend to many people at once.
Introverts talking to extroverts chose cheerier topics, reported making conversation more easily, and described conversing with extroverts as a “breath of fresh air.” In contrast, the extroverts felt that they could relax more with introvert partners and were freer to confide their problems. They didn’t feel pressure to be falsely upbeat.
“I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling, they buy because they feel understood.” - Jon Berghoff
“I got to the point where I could walk into someone’s house and instead of trying to sell them some knives, I’d ask a hundred questions in a row. I could manage the entire conversation just by asking the right questions.” - Jon Berghoff
“I try to tune in to the radio station of the person I’m working with. I pay attention to the energy they exude. It’s easy for me to do that because I’m in my head a lot, anyways.” - Jon Berghoff
“In sales there’s a truism that ‘we have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionately.’ I believe that’s what makes someone really good at selling or consulting—the number-one thing is they’ve got to really listen well. When I look at the top salespeople in my organization, none of those extroverted qualities are the key to their success.” - Jon Berghoff
Chapter 11: On Cobblers and Generals
How to Cultivate Quiet Kids in a World That Can't Hear Them
“With anything young and tender the most important part of the task is the beginning of it; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression more readily taken.” - Plato
We should all look out for cobblers who might have been great generals.
It doesn’t have to be a bad fit when extroverted parents have an introverted child. With a little mindfulness and understanding, any parent can have a good fit with any kind of child.
Advice from a parent who appreciates how a child feels is inherently validating. If your son is nervous on the first day of school, it helps to tell him that you felt the same way when you started school and still do sometimes at work, but that it gets easier with time. Even if he doesn’t believe you, you’ll signal that you understand and accept him.
Don’t mistake your child’s caution in new situations for an inability to relate to others. He’s recoiling from novelty or overstimulation, not from human contact.
The key is to expose your child gradually to new situations and people—taking care to respect his limits, even when they seem extreme. This produces more confident kids than either overprotection or pushing too hard. Let him know that his feelings are normal and natural, but also that there’s nothing to be afraid of: “I know it can feel funny to play with someone you’ve never met, but I bet that boy would love to play trucks with you if you asked him.” Go at your child’s pace; don’t rush him. If he’s young, make the initial introductions with the other little boy if you have to. And stick around in the background—or, when he’s really little, with a gentle, supportive hand on his back—for as long as he seems to benefit from your presence. When he takes social risks, let him know you admire his efforts: “I saw you go up to those new kids yesterday. I know that can be difficult, and I’m proud of you.”
They don’t rush; every small step is a giant stride in a child’s world.
If you want your child to learn these skills, don’t let her hear you call her “shy”: she’ll believe the label and experience her nervousness as a fixed trait rather than an emotion she can control. She also knows full well that “shy” is a negative word in our society. Above all, do not shame her for her shyness.
Kids stop learning when they feel emotionally threatened.
Experts believe that negative public speaking experiences in childhood can leave children with a lifelong terror of the podium.
Extroverts tend to like movement, stimulation, collaborative work. Introverts prefer lectures, downtime, and independent projects. Mix it up fairly.
In many fields, it’s impossible to gain mastery without knowing how to work on one’s own. Have your extroverted students take a page from their introverted peers’ playbooks. Teach all kids to work independently.
Even if they’re generally forthcoming, many kids won’t share experiences that made them feel ashamed. The younger your child is, the more likely she is to open up, so you should start this process as early in her school career as possible. Ask your child for information in a gentle, nonjudgmental way, with specific, clear questions. Instead of “How was your day?” try “What did you do in math class today?” Instead of “Do you like your teacher?” ask “What do you like about your teacher?” Or “What do you not like so much?” Let her take her time to answer. Try to avoid asking, in the overly bright voice of parents everywhere, “Did you have fun in school today?!” She’ll sense how important it is that the answer be yes.
While extroverts are more likely to skate from one hobby or activity to another, introverts often stick with their enthusiasms. This gives them a major advantage as they grow, because true self-esteem comes from competence, not the other way around. Researchers have found that intense engagement in and commitment to an activity is a proven route to happiness and well-being.
The way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing (“I was never the same again after my wife left me”), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise (“The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I’m so much happier with my new wife”). Those who live the most fully realized lives—giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves—tend to find meaning in their obstacles.
Conclusion
Wonderland
“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.” - Anaïs Nin
Love is essential; gregariousness is optional. Cherish your nearest and dearest. Work with colleagues you like and respect.
The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamp-lit desk. Use your natural powers—of persistence, concentration, insight, and sensitivity—to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply.
Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it.
Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.
Think twice about how you design your organization’s office space. Don’t expect introverts to get jazzed up about open office plans or, for that matter, lunchtime birthday parties or team-building retreats. Make the most of introverts’ strengths—these are the people who can help you think deeply, strategize, solve complex problems, and spot canaries in your coal mine.