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Many introverts are also "highly sensitive," which sounds poetic, but is actually a technical term in psychology. If you are a sensitive sort, then you're more apt than the average person to feel pleasantly overwhelmed by Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" or a well-turned phrase or an act of extraordinary kindness. You may be quicker than others to feel sickened by violence and ugliness, and you likely have a very strong conscience. When you w..
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Susan Cain |
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people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that," he has said. "I draw energy from discussing ideas."
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Susan Cain |
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difference has to do with how the two cultures define respect.
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Susan Cain |
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A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under ..
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Susan Cain |
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All the comments from childhood still ring in my ears, that I was lazy, stupid, slow, boring," writes a member of an e-mail list called Introvert Retreat. "By the time I was old enough to figure out that I was simply introverted, it was a part of my being, the assumption that there is something inherently wrong with me. I wish I could find that little vestige of doubt and remove it."
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Susan Cain |
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555e759
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Studie dokazaly, ze tretina az polovina z nas jsou introverti. To znamena, ze ve tride mate vic introvertnich deti, nez si myslite.
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Susan Cain |
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America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality--and opened up a Pandora's Box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover. In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private. The word personality didn't exist ..
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Susan Cain |
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So what's John's secret for relating to his forceful wife? He lets her know that her words were unacceptable, but he also tries to listen to their meaning. "I try to tap into my empathy," he says. "I take her tone out of the equation. I take out the assault on my senses, and I try to get to what she's trying to say."
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Susan Cain |
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What's so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it's only when you're alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are no..
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wisdom
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Susan Cain |
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Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much," a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Of course, there's another word for such people: thinkers."
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Susan Cain |
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We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal--the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we a..
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Susan Cain |
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So the next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet. We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kind of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard's education.
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Susan Cain |
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Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The "evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups," writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham."
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Susan Cain |
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Grant had a theory about which kinds of circumstances would call for introverted leadership. His hypothesis was that extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, but that introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees. To test his idea, he and two colleagues, professors Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and David Hofman of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Caro..
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Susan Cain |
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introverts are "geared to inspect" and extroverts "geared to respond."
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Susan Cain |
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Keltner even says that if he had to choose his mate by asking a single question at a speed-dating event, the question he would choose is: "What was your last embarrassing experience?" Then he would watch very carefully for lip-presses, blushing, and averted eyes..."Embarrassment reveals how much the individual cares about the rules that bind us to one another...It's better to mind too much than to mind too little."
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Susan Cain |
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I was the nicest person you'd ever want to know," Alex recalls, "but the world wasn't that way. The problem was that if you were just a nice person, you'd get crushed. I refused to live a life where people could do that stuff to me. I was like, OK, what's the policy prescription here? And there really was only one. I needed to have every person in my pocket. If I wanted to be a nice person, I needed to run the school." But how to get from A..
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Susan Cain |
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In couples where the man is introverted and the woman extroverted, as with Sarah and Bob, we often mistake personality conflicts for gender difference,
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Susan Cain |
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Caucasians, he said, seem to be "less afraid of other people thinking that what they said was too loud or too stupid."
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Susan Cain |
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1. _______ I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities. 2. _______ I often prefer to express myself in writing. 3. _______ I enjoy solitude. 4. _______ I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status. 5. _______ I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me. 6. _______ People tell me that I'm a good listener. 7. _______ I'm not a big risk-taker. 8. _______ I enjoy ..
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Susan Cain |
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students take ownership of their education when they learn from one another
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Susan Cain |
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learned to not worry so much about the outcome,
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Susan Cain |
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The Asians were far more likely to accept a proposal from the friendly business manager than from the hostile one;
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Susan Cain |
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Those who live the most fully realized lives--giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves--tend to find meaning in their obstacles.
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Susan Cain |
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It's also important for companies to groom listeners
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Susan Cain |
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In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly. Free Trait Theory explains why an introvert might throw his extroverted wife a surprise party or join the PTA at his daughter's school. It explains how it's possible for an extroverted scientist to behave with reserve in her laboratory, for an agreeable person to act hard-nosed durin..
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Susan Cain |
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He views self-monitoring as an act of modesty. It's about accommodating oneself to situational norms, rather than "grinding down everything to one's own needs and concerns." Not all self-monitoring is based on acting, he says, or on working the room. A more introverted version may be less concerned with spotlight-seeking and more with the avoidance of social faux pas."
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Susan Cain |
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And every day, Don wrestles with himself. Should he go back to his apartment and recharge over a quiet lunch, as he longs to do, or join his classmates?
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Susan Cain |
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Her idea of a perfect start to the weekend is a quiet evening at the movies, just her and Greg.
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Susan Cain |
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neuroscientists have even found that people who use Botox, which prevents them from making angry faces, seem to be less anger-prone than those who don't, because the very act of frowning triggers the amygdala to process negative emotions.
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Susan Cain |
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The truth is that many schools are designed for extroverts.
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Susan Cain |
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Introversion--along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness--is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world,
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Susan Cain |
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Carnegie's metamorphosis from farmboy to salesman to public-speaking icon is also the story of the rise of the Extrovert Ideal. Carnegie's journey reflected a cultural evolution that reached a tipping point around the turn of the twentieth century, changing forever who we are and whom we admire, how we act at job interviews and what we look for in an employee, how we court our mates and raise our children. America had shifted from what the ..
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Susan Cain |
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Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting? Must we learn to stage-manage our voices, gestures, and body language until we can tell--sell--any story we want? These seem venal aspirations, a marker of how far we've come--and not in a good way--since
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Susan Cain |
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we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.
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Susan Cain |
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We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual--the
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Susan Cain |
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Don is "a bitter introvert," as he cheerfully puts it--bitter because the more time he spends at HBS, the more convinced he becomes that he'd better change his ways."
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Susan Cain |
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America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality--and opened up a Pandora's
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Susan Cain |
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today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles.
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Susan Cain |
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solitude is an important key to creativity--then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We'd want to teach our kids to work independently. We'd want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite.
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Susan Cain |
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the earliest open-source creators didn't share office space--often they didn't even live in the same country. Their collaborations took place largely in the ether. This is not an insignificant detail. If you had gathered the same people who created Linux, installed them in a giant conference room for a year, and asked them to devise a new operating system, it's doubtful that anything so revolutionary would have occurred--for reasons we'll e..
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Susan Cain |
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For ten years, beginning in 2000, Fried asked hundreds of people (mostly designers, programmers, and writers) where they liked to work when they needed to get something done. He found that they went anywhere but their offices, which were too noisy and full of interruptions.
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Susan Cain |
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ccad12b
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He has trouble elbowing his way into class discussions; in some classes he barely speaks at all. He prefers to contribute only when he believes he has something insightful to add, or honest-to-God disagrees with someone.
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Susan Cain |
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As she grew older and ventured outside her family's orbit, she continued to notice things about herself that seemed different from the norm. She could drive alone for hours and never turn on the radio. She had trouble finding the sacred in the everyday; it seemed to be there only when she withdrew from the world.
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Susan Cain |