The power of introverts
snopSusan Cain When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitca full of books, which to me emed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Becau in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.
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(Laughter)
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Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day, our counlor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spe
ll rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." (Laughter) Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were suppod to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody el. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.
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But the first time that I took my book out of my suitca, the coolest girl in the bunk came up
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opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the cond time I tried it, the counlor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.
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And so I put my books away, back in their suitca, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them. But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitca again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer.
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Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it -- all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always nd deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly becau I needed to prove to mylf that I could be bold and asrtive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made the lf-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them.
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Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. And at the risk of sounding grandio, it is the world's loss. Becau when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. A
third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half. So that's one out of every two or thre
好听的小名男孩e people you know. So even if you're an extrovert yourlf, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spous and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing.
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Now, to e the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is. It's different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. Not all the time -- the things aren't absolute -- but a lot of the time. So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourlves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us.
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But now here's where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. A
nd also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.
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So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks -- four or five or six or ven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and
creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. And for the kids who prefer to go off by themlves or just to work alone, tho kids are en as outliers often or, wor, as problem cas. And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as oppod to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to rearch. (Laughter)
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Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls,
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where we are subject to the constant noi and gaze of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely pasd over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks -- which is something we might all favor nowadays. And interesting rearch by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, becau when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let tho employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface.动如脱兔的意思
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Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples. Eleanor Roovelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi -- all the peopled described themlves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. And this turns out to have a special power all its own, becau people could feel that the leaders were at the helm not becau they enjoyed
directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there becau they had no choice, becau they were driven to do what they thought was right.
1970年4月24日
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Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts. I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. And we all fall at different points, of cour, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized the terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call the people ambiverts. And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. But many of us do recognize ourlves as one type or the other.
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And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance. We need more of a yin and yang between the two types. This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, becau when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a rious streak of introversion in them.
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And this is becau solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations. Theodor Geil, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his hou in La J olla, California. And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this
