I’m prone to wild flights of self-doubt, but I also have a deep well of courage in my own convictions. I feel horribly uncomfortable on my first day in a foreign city, but I love to travel. I was shy as a child, but have outgrown the worst of it.
They like to read; for them there’s nothing more exciting than ideas. And some of this has to do with how they spent their time when they were growing up.
Another example, this one from the 2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, concerns a self-described introvert based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he’s well known for shutting himself inside his office for hours at a time. Warren Buffett, the legendary.
Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends.
We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts – which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.
We can also trace our admiration of extroverts to the Greeks, for whom oratory was an exalted skill, and to the Romans, for whom the worst possible punishment was banishment from the city, with its teeming social life.
But does it always make sense to equate leadership with hyper-extroversion?
If “fast” and “slow” animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, “some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don’t get any respect.
The word that Kagan first used to describe high-reactive people was inhibited, and that’s exactly how I still feel at some dinner parties.
The introvert as poet or science nerd, the extrovert as jock or cheerleader? Aren’t we all a little of both?
This theory of extroversion is still young, and it is not absolute.
Imagine how much better you’ll be at this sweet-spot game once you’re aware of playing it. You can set up your work, your hobbies, and your social life so that you spend as much time inside your sweet spot as possible.
We fail to realize that participating in an online working group is a form of solitude all its own.
She had strong, sometimes disturbing dreams at night. She was “strangely intense,” and often beset by powerful emotions, both positive and negative. She had trouble finding the sacred in the everyday; it seemed to be there only when she withdrew from the world.
It suggests that when it comes time to make group decisions, extroverts would do well to listen to introverts – especially when they see problems ahead.
For very different reasons, shy and introverted people might choose to spend their days in behind-the-scenes pursuits like inventing, or researching, or holding the hands of the gravely ill – or in leadership positions they execute with quiet competence. These are not alpha roles, but the people who play them are role models all the same.
We know this type of person well from literature, probably because so many writers are sensitive introverts themselves. He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men,” the novelist Eric Malpass writes of his quiet and cerebral protagonist, also an author, in the novel The Long Long Dances.
Even T. S. Eliot’s famous 1915 poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – in which he laments the need to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
Here’s one answer: social media has made new forms of leadership possible for scores of people who don’t fit the Harvard Business School mold.
A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope.