Ericsson wondered what had happened. I really thought about this a lot, he recalls in an interview with Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code.
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...
According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits—introversion, for example—but we can and do act out of character in the service of core personal proj...
Verbal fluency and sociability are the two most important predictors of success, according to a Stanford Business School study.
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Three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking: onl...
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....
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 autono...
Seem to need people as a forum to fill needs for social impact, just as a general needs soldiers to fill his or her need to lead,
Introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compete with.
Introverts are geared to inspect and extroverts geared to respond.
In the words of psychologists John Brebner and Chris Cooper, who have shown that extroverts think less and act faster on such tasks: introverts are geared to inspect and extroverts geared to respond....
Extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, but that introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees.
Evangelical churches often make extroversion a prerequisite for leadership, sometimes explicitly. The priest must be … an extrovert who enthusiastically engages members and newcomers, a team player, r...
Assumes that it’s good to accentuate positive emotions, but that isn’t correct, the psychology professor Richard Howard told me, pointing to the example of soccer victories that end in violence and pr...
A high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, acad...
You may be quicker than others to feel sickened by violence and ugliness, and you likely have a very strong conscience.
When introverts hit the number nine button and find they’ve lost a point, they slow down before moving on to the next number, as if to reflect on what went wrong. But extroverts not only fail to slow...
We tend to write Moses’ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMille’s classic, The Ten Commandments, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from...
We fail to realize that participating in an online working group is a form of solitude all its own.