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 b...
He also suggests No-Talk Thursdays, one day a week in which employees aren’t allowed to speak to each other.
Greg and Emily are an example of an introvert-extrovert couple who love and madden each other in equal measure. Greg, who just turned thirty, has a bounding gait, a mop of dark hair continually fallin...
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 a...
Everything in the service involved communication, he says with gentle exasperation. Greeting people, the lengthy sermon, the singing. There was no emphasis on quiet, liturgy, ritual, things that give...
Even multitasking, that prized feat of modern-day office warriors, turns out to be a myth. Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What look...
Even T. S. Eliot’s famous 1915 poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—in which he laments the need to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
Do you really believe in what you said or wrote – in the thing that’s bringing criticism? And if I do believe it, I can withstand anything.
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 upgra...
College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice.
Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai, whose entire investment strategy was based on FUD: they placed bets that had limited downside, but would pay off handsomely if dramatic but unexpected changes occurred in...
But buzz also has considerable downsides. Everyone assumes that it’s good to accentuate positive emotions, but that isn’t correct, the psychology professor Richard Howard told me, pointing to the exam...
But as the word satyagraha implies, 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. Restraint,...
Big Five traits: Introversion-Extroversion; Agreeableness; Openness to Experience; Conscientiousness; and Emotional Stability.
At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability.
As Jung felicitously put it, There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.
America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality
All of this would be fine if more talking were correlated with greater insight, but research suggests that there’s no such link.
A very different study, in which robots interacted with stroke patients during physical rehabilitation exercises, yielded strikingly similar results. Introverted patients responded better and interact...
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...