I don’t really like being the guest at someone else’s party, because then I have to be entertaining. But I’ll host parties because it puts you at the center of things without actually being a social person.
Although we often hang back in group situations, evidence proves that introverts make strong leaders – often delivering better outcomes than extroverted leaders do. Yes, you read that right – not just decent outcomes, but better ones.
The introverted leaders were 20 percent more likely to follow the suggestion – and their teams had 24 percent better results than the teams of the extroverted leaders.
Parks herself seemed aware of this paradox, calling her autobiography Quiet Strength – a title that challenges us to question our assumptions. Why shouldn’t quiet be strong? And what else can quiet do that we don’t give it credit for?
Even though I make no special attempt to observe the discipline of silence, living alone automatically makes me refrain from the sins of speech. – KAMO NO CHOMEI, 12th Century Japanese recluse.
When you’re feeling scared, genuine passion will lift you up and give you the excitement you need to propel you through your fear. Fear is a powerful enemy, but passion is an even stronger friend.
Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones.
Caucasians, he said, seem to be “less afraid of other people thinking that what they said was too loud or too stupid.
Aron and a team of scientists have also found that when sensitive people see faces of people experiencing strong feelings, they have more activation than others do in areas of the brain associated with empathy and with trying to control strong emotions. It’s as if, like Eleanor Roosevelt, they can’t help but feel what others feel.
A more recent study, published by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type Research Services in 1996 sampled 914,219 people and found that 49.3 percent were extroverts and 50.7 percent were introverts.
Gore is, by many accounts, an introvert. “If you send an introvert into a reception or an event with a hundred other people he will emerge with less energy than he had going in,” says a former aide. “Gore needs a rest after an event.” Gore acknowledges that his skills are not conducive to stumping and speechmaking. “Most people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands.
She also knows full well that “shy” is a negative word in our society. Above all, do not shame her for her shyness.
Introversion is also very different from Asperger’s syndrome, the autism spectrum disorder that involves difficulties with social interactions such as reading facial expressions and body language... unlike people with Asperger’s, introverts often have strong social skills. Compared with the one third to one half of Americans who are introverts, only one in five thousand people has Asperger’s.
At the onset of the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for frankly selfish reasons.
Introverts 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 future. 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.
In iWoz, he recalls HP as a meritocracy where it didn’t matter what you looked like, where there was no premium on playing social games, and where no one pushed him from his beloved engineering work into management. That was what collaboration meant for Woz: the ability to share a donut and a brainwave with his laid-back, nonjudgmental, poorly dressed colleagues – who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.
Note that these days many scientists dislike the phrase “limbic system.” This is because no one really knows which parts of the brain this term refers to. The brain areas included in this system have changed over the years, and today many use the term to mean brain areas that have something to do with emotion. Still, it’s a useful shorthand.
In this chapter I focused on the dopamine-driven reward system and its role in delivering life’s goodies. But there’s a mirror-image brain network, often called the loss avoidance system, whose job it is to call our attention to risk. If the reward network chases shiny fruit, the loss avoidance system worries about bad apples.
Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities.
These results would not surprise anyone familiar with traditional Asian attitudes to the spoken word: talk is for communicating need-to-know information; quiet and introspection are signs of deep thought and higher truth. Words are potentially dangerous weapons that reveal things better left unsaid. They hurt other people; they can get their speaker into trouble.