Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again. —ANAÏS NIN
Or at school you might have been prodded to come out of your shell—that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans...
Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers ar...
Of course, there’s another word for such people: thinkers.
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 pity...
Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating.
Nobody is going to care who won or lost any election when the earth is uninhabitable. - Al Gore
Nobody is going to care who won or lost any election when the earth is uninhabitable.
No one can hear her. No one tries.
Most leading in a corporation is done in small meetings and it’s done at a distance, through written and video communications,
Moses, for example, was not, according to some interpretations of his story, the brash, talkative type who would organize road trips and hold forth in a classroom at Harvard Business School. On the co...
Men who were too quiet around women risked being thought gay; as a popular 1926 sex guide observed, homosexuals are invariably timid, shy, retiring.
Many introver- ted kids grow up to have excellent so- cial skills, although they tend to join groups in their own way—waiting a while before they plunge in, or particip- ating only for short periods....
Keep in mind the words of Sir Winston Churchill: 'Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Kagan has given us painstakingly documented evidence that high reactivity is one biological basis of introversion but his findings are powerful in part because they confirm what we’ve sensed all along...
Kafka, for example, couldn’t bear to be near even his adoring fiancée while he worked: You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all....
It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent.
It’s not enough, one senior manager at Eastman Kodak told the author Daniel Goleman, to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you’re squeamish about presenti...
It was only when God paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the assignment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; A...
It also helps explain why extroverts are more prone than introverts to overconfidence—defined as greater confidence unmatched by greater ability.