After more than a year in relative solitude, naturally extroverted people are thronging to bars and ballgames, eager to reconnect with their friends - and frankly - total strangers as well. Extroverts thrive amid the swirl of social life and networking opportunities. Extroverted people spend relatively little time listening to others and reflecting on what they have experienced. Characteristically introverted people spend a lot more time with their own thoughts. They are usually observant and good listeners and may be better at synthesizing complex situations.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking By Susan Cain
The lesson is clear. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need
leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great
In America, there is a cultural preference for extroversion. Cain gives several dispirit
examples from Tony Robbins, Harvard Business School and evangelical ministries. She
moves on to psychological studies that demonstrate how the contributions of introverted people may be discounted or ignored in popular culture - to the detriment of final results.
Some highlights:
Asch & Bern studies on peer pressure and the ‘pain of independence’ highlight the
physiological impact of dissent, which is essential to an effective democracy.
Face-to-face interactions create trust in a way that online interactions cannot; this is very important to understand after a year of working and learning remotely.
Twin studies show that Introversion - Extraversion is 40-50% inherited. The
question is HOW one’s inborn temperament interacts with the environment and
one’s own free will. To what degree is temperament destiny?
Enjoyment appears to be the boundary between boredom and anxiety when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow.
The key to ‘flow’ is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. To achieve such autonomy, a person must learn to provide rewards to oneself.
Quiet people may be considered shy or sensitive. They tend to be philosophical or spiritual rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They tend to be keen observers, creative or intuitive. They may notice subtleties that others miss. In order to be successful in a majority-extrovert world, many introverts have learned to appear less cautious or single-minded than they feel. Introverts tend to think about potential problems or disadvantages more than extroverts. In group situations, extroverts could learn from listening to the concerns of introverts. Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity monitoring how the task is going.
Professor Brian Little has provided Free Trait Theory to explain how introverts may ‘act out of character’ to engage in public projects that are considered meaningful. Public speeches, charity galas and dinner parties may be exhausting for the introverted person, but also rewarding.
The later chapters of the book provide some advise on raising introverted children and
managing introverted employees.
Here are some other resources: