People who are aware of their sweet spots have the power to leave jobs that exhaust them and start new and satisfying businesses. They.
We fail to realize that participating in an online working group is a form of solitude all its own. Instead we assume that the success of online collaborations will be replicated in the face-to-face world.
Introverts also seem better than extroverts at delaying gratification, a crucial life skill associated with everything from higher SAT scores and income to lower body mass index.
High-reactive children raised in supportive environments are even more resistant than other kids to the common cold and other respiratory illnesses, but get sick more easily if they’re raised in stressful conditions.
Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. 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.
On the other side of the debate are a group of psychologists known as the Situationists. Situationism posits that our generalizations about people, including the words we use to describe one another – shy, aggressive, conscientious, agreeable – are misleading. There is no core self; there are only the various selves of Situations X, Y, and Z.
Introverts just just don’t buzz as easily.
Restorative niches are essential to an introvert’s happiness.
Quiet Strength – a.
The most effective leaders are not motivated by a desire to control events or to be in the spotlight. They are motivated by the desire to advance ideas and new ways of looking at the world, or to improve the situation of a group of people. These motivations belong to introverts and extroverts alike. You can achieve these same goals – you can be inspiring and motivational – without compromising your quiet ways.
Remarkable, but perhaps not surprising. Psychologists are trained to heal, so their research naturally focuses on problems and pathology.
The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it’s also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.
This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the “bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death – bitter and sweet – are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it.
If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it – rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage – as the bridge we need to connect with each other. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someone’s opinions, no matter how radiant, or fierce, someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.
It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.
Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.
The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities – the dark as well as the light – is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.
Philosophers call this the “paradox of tragedy,” and they’ve puzzled over it for centuries. Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow, when the rest of the time we’ll do anything to avoid it?
I don’t want my heart to be broken,” they say. Or, “I don’t want to fail.” “I understand,” Susan tells them. “But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.
It’s just the most amazing thing to see the introvert revolution literally remaking the way we organize society – this time, the world of book clubs.