In most job interviews, people say they are looking for people skills and emotional intelligence. That’s reasonable, but the question is, how do you define what that looks like?
I’m not saying abolish group work – I think there’s a time and a place for people to come together and exchange ideas, but let’s restore the respect we once had for solitude. And we need to be much more mindful of the way we come together.
I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country...
Our culture rightly admires risk-takers, but we need our ‘heed-takers’ more than ever.
Naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.
Do you really believe in what you said or wrote – in the thing that’s bringing criticism? And if I do believe it, I can withstand anything.
America had shifted from what influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a culture of character to a culture of personality, and opened up a Pandora’s box of personal anxieties of which we would never recover.
Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting?
Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.
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.
Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.
In our culture, snails are not considered valiant animals – we are constantly exhorting people to “come out of their shells” – but there’s a lot to be said for taking your home with you wherever you go.
The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.
Don’t think of introversion as something that needs to be cured.
Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances.
Or at school you might have been prodded to come “out of your shell” – that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans are just the same.
Introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation.
College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups.
Introversion – along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness – is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.
But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.