Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.
Introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation.
College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups.
Introversion – along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness – is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.
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.
We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.
The bias against introversion leads to a colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness.
I’m insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.
I’m insatiably curious about human nature.
Some introverts are perfectly comfortable with public speaking; I’m not one of them.
Your tendency to be inward-directed or outward-directed is huge; it governs every part of the way you live and work and love.
A widely held, but rarely articulated, belief in our society is that the ideal self is bold, alpha, gregarious. Introversion is viewed somewhere between disappointment and pathology.
I use a lot of old-fashioned expressions.
I get a lot of letters from introverts asking how they can meet people. The key is to make sure that you are doing things you enjoy.
I actually find extroversion to be a really appealing personality style.
Even when the attention focused on me is positive, I am uncomfortable being looked at by a lot of people – it’s just not my natural state of being.
As a parent, if give yourself what you need, your children will watch you doing that and will give themselves what they need.
Any time people come together in a meeting, we’re not necessarily getting the best ideas; we’re just getting the ideas of the best talkers.
Solve problems, make art, think deeply.
Shyness is inherently uncomfortable; introversion is not. The traits do overlap, though psychologists debate to what degree.
I’ve never given a speech without being terrified first.