The journalist Nicholas Lemann once interviewed a group of Asian-Americans on the subject of meritocracy for his book The Big Test. “A sentiment that emerges consistently,” he wrote, “is that meritocracy ends on graduation day, and that afterward, Asians start to fall behind because they don’t have quite the right cultural style for getting ahead: too passive, not hail-fellow-well-met enough.

— Susan Cain

Susan Cain Quotes

Gandhi’s passivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way.

— Susan Cain

Instead, it may be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness – of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light. It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.

— Susan Cain

It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while their introverted peers are asking “what if.

— Susan Cain

Philip Muskin told The Atlantic magazine, “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.

— Susan Cain

They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.

— Susan Cain

They said she was “timid and shy” but had “the courage of a lion.

— Susan Cain

It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.

— Susan Cain

Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth.

— Susan Cain

Our difficulty accepting impermanence is the heart of human suffering.

— Susan Cain

I wonder whether students like the young safety officer would be better off if we appreciated that not everyone aspires to be a leader in the conventional sense of the word – that some people wish to fit harmoniously into the group, and others to be independent of it.

— Susan Cain

Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions.

— Susan Cain

May I be free from danger. May I be free from mental suffering. May I be free from physical suffering. May I have ease of well-being. The idea is to wish these states first to yourself, then to an ever-widening circle of people: loved ones, acquaintances, the difficult people in your life, and then finally to all beings.

— Susan Cain

It’s because of relationship honoring, for example, that social anxiety disorder in Japan, known as taijin kyofusho, takes the form not of excessive worry about embarrassing oneself, as it does in the United States, but of embarrassing others.

— Susan Cain

The amygdala serves as the brain’s emotional switchboard, receiving information from the senses and then signaling the rest of the brain and nervous system how to respond.

— Susan Cain

And the single most important aspect of personality – the “north and south of temperament,” as one scientist puts it – is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.

— Susan Cain

With an average weekly attendance of 22,000 and counting, Saddleback Church is one of the largest and most influential evangelical churches in the nation.

— Susan Cain

No confunda la firmeza o la elocuencia con las buenas ideas.

— Susan Cain

For example, highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They’re often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee.

— Susan Cain

Everyone said this was a huge mistake, and Wall Street downgraded Kimberly-Clark’s stock. But Smith, unmoved by the crowd, did what he thought was right. As a result, the company grew stronger and soon outpaced its rivals. Asked later about his strategy, Smith replied that he never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

— Susan Cain

The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation – the heart of the knowledge economy – is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell.

— Susan Cain
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