If you’re a naturally bittersweet type, you have a head start; you’re constitutionally primed to feel the tug of impermanence. Another way to get there is simply to wait for middle age, which seems to carry some of the psychological benefits of aging without the downsides of your body falling apart.
Subtractor,” a boxlike contraption of wires, knobs, and gizmos. But the awkwardness of those years didn’t deter him from pursuing his dream; it probably nurtured it. He would never have learned so much about computers, Woz says now, if he hadn’t been too shy to leave the house.
But in the case of this commander, says Grant, people respected not just his formal authority, but also the way he led: by supporting his employees’ efforts to take the initiative. He gave subordinates input into key decisions, implementing the ideas that made sense, while making it clear that he had the final authority. He wasn’t concerned with getting credit or even with being in charge; he simply assigned work to those who could perform it best.
Participation places a very different set of demands on the brain than observing does. It requires a kind of mental multitasking: the ability to process a lot of short-term information at once without becoming distracted or overly stressed.
Extroverts, on the other hand, can be so intent on putting their own stamp on events that they risk losing others’ good ideas along the way and allowing workers to lapse into passivity. “Often the leaders end up doing a lot of the talking,” says Francesca Gino, “and not listening to any of the ideas that the followers are trying to provide.
FDR, elected at the start of the Depression, is remembered for his compassion. But it was Eleanor who made sure he knew how suffering Americans felt.
But public opinion was beside the point for Franklin and Eleanor. Each had strengths that the other craved – her empathy, his bravado. “E is an Angel,” Franklin wrote in his journal. When she accepted his marriage proposal in 1903, he proclaimed himself the happiest man alive. She responded with a flood of love letters. They were married in 1905 and went on to have six children.
Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.
Intuitively, she had engaged in an act of passive resistance, a precept named by Leo Tolstoy and embraced by Mahatma Gandhi,” writes the historian Douglas Brinkley in a wonderful biography of Parks. It was more than a decade before King popularized the idea of nonviolence and long before Parks’s own training in civil disobedience, but, Brinkley writes, “such principles were a perfect match for her own personality.
Extroverts, in other words, are characterized by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog status to sexual highs to cold cash.
University admissions officers looked not for the most exceptional candidates, but for the most extroverted. Harvard’s provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the “sensitive, neurotic” type and the “intellectually over-stimulated” in favor of boys of the “healthy extrovert kind.
Since it had to happen,” King told the crowd, “I’m happy it happened to a person like Rosa Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character. Mrs. Parks is unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there.
In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explores the influence of “Connectors” – people who have a “special gift for bringing the world together” and “an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections.
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.
Don’t think about the perfect answer. It’s better to get out there and say something than to never get your voice in.
Those who value a quiet, reflective life will feel a burden lifting from their shoulders as they read Susan Cain’s eloquent and well documented paean to introversion – and will no longer feel guilty or inferior for having made the better choice!” – MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, author of Flow and distinguished professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University.
Osborn’s “rules” of brainstorming were meant to neutralize this anxiety, but studies show that the fear of public humiliation is a potent force.
Saddleback also has one more thing in common with Harvard Business School: its debt to – and propagation of – the Culture of Personality.
It’s always been private occasions that make me feel connected to the joys and sorrows of the world, often in the form of communion with writers and musicians I’ll never meet in person. Proust called these moments of unity between writer and reader “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Other people would get louder and louder, and I would get quieter and quieter.