We’re built to live simultaneously in love and loss, bitter and sweet.
The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly – care enough to act.
Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe. The compassionate instinct is also a fundamental aspect of the human success story – and one of the great powers of bittersweetness.
But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen – to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.
Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality – neither overstimulating nor understimulating, neither boring nor anxiety-making. You can organize your life in terms of what personality psychologists call “optimal levels of arousal” and what I call “sweet spots,” and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before.
If you’re a sensitive sort, then you may be in the habit of pretending to be more of a politician and less cautious or single-mindedly focused than you actually are. But in this chapter I’m asking you to rethink this view. Without people like you, we will, quite literally, drown.
We’re most passionate about that which we’re most denied, and these things manifest in the companies and teams we build. If you’ve been bullied, your whole life is trying to disprove the peers or family members who once tormented you. If you have deep insecurity, you might hire a lot of yes people.
Longing itself is divine,” writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss.
The body’s reward and threat systems also seem to work independently of each other, so that the same person can be generally sensitive, or insensitive, to both reward and threat.
If these statistics surprise you, that’s probably because so many people pretend to be extroverts.
And it’s the kids we might call the most sensitive, the most high-reactive, the ones who are likely to be introverts who feel the guiltiest.
Remember that there are many paths to a satisfying life.
The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass.
Buffett used to dread public speaking until he took a Dale Carnegie course.
How could you be shy and courageous?
Introverts are offered keys to private gardens full of riches. To possess such a key is to tumble like Alice down her rabbit hole.
All the comments from childhood still ring in my ears, that I was lazy, stupid, slow, boring.
One of Don’s classmates was in a group lucky to include a young man with extensive experience in the northern backwoods. He had a lot of good ideas about how to rank the fifteen salvaged items. But his group didn’t listen, because he expressed his views too quietly.
You see this all the time. People ask, ‘How did this happen, how did we pay so much?’ Usually it’s said that they were carried away by the situation, but that’s not right. Usually they’re carried away by people who are assertive and domineering. The risk with our students is that they’re very good at getting their way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going the right way.
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.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas.