Quiet - Susan Cain Flashcards
Part One: The Extrovert Ideal
We live with a value system called the Extrovert Ideal - the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight.
Alpha - man tending to assume a dominant or domineering role in social or professional situations
The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt.
Introversion is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.
Many of us work in organisations that insist we work in teams, in offices without walls, for supervisors who value “people skills” above all. To advance our careers, we’re expected to promote ourselves unabashedly.
Introverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties, but after a while wish they were home in their pyjamas. Many have a horror of small talk but enjoy deep discussions.
If there is only one insight you take away from this book I hope it’s a newfound sense of entitlement to be yourself.
The word personality did not exist until the 18th century, and the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.
We have moved from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality.
Every American is now a ‘performing self’. The rise of industrial America was a major force behind this cultural evolution.
The idea of wrapping their social anxieties in the neat package of a psychological complex appealed to many Americans. The Inferiority Complex became an all-purpose explanation for problems in many areas of life, ranging from love to parenting to career.
Today’s students inhabit a world in which status, income and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.
The Myth of Charismatic Leadership
What if you love knowledge for its own sake, not necessarily as a blueprint to action.
At the onset of the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for selfish reasons - as a way of outshining the crowd in a newly anonymous and competitive society.
Harvard Business School is the ‘Spiritual Capital of Extroversion’
If you leave HBS without having built an extensive social network, it’s like you failed your HBS experience.
We graduate into a business culture in which verbal fluency and sociability are the 2 most important predictors of success.
We put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.
We tend to overestimate how outgoing leaders need to be.
Average weekly attendance of 22,000 people, Saddleback church is one of the largest evangelical churches in the nation. Its leader is Rick Warren.
Saddleback has one thing in common with HBS: its debt to - and propagation of - the Culture of Personality.
The evangelical culture ties together faithfulness with extroversion.
Pastor Warren seems well-meaning but it must be hard for Saddleback’s introverts feel good about themselves.
“It’s always been private occasions that make me feel connected to the joys and sorrows of the world, often in the form of communion with writers and musicians I’ll never meet in person.”
Proust called these moments of unity between writer and reader “that fruitful miracle of a communion in the midst of solitude”.
Evangelicalism has taken the Extrovert Ideal to its logical extreme. If you don’t love Jesus out loud, then it must not be real love. It’s not enough to forge your own spiritual connection to the divine; it must be displayed publicly.
When Collaboration Kills Creativity
Steve Wozniak: “Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me - they’re shy and they live in their heads. Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own, Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
Introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation. Introversion concentrates the mind on the tasks in hand, and prevents the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.
Groupthink is a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work. It elevates teamwork above all else. It is embraced by many corporations.
Outstanding introverted leaders, such as Charles Darwin, have spent long periods of their lives in solitude.
Cooperative learning and open office plans emerged with the rise of the Internet which lent cool and gravitas to the idea of collaboration.
However, solo practice is where the real work gets done. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups.
Exceptional achievement is reached through Deliberate Practice (alone).
Top performers overwhelmingly work for companies that give their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.
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 argue more with their colleagues. They have elevated stress levels. They worry more about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates and releases cortisol.
Excessive stimulation seems to impede learning. The simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity. Even multitasking turns out to be a myth. Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time.
Multitasking is just ‘continuous partial attention’.
Group brainstorming does not work. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases.
“If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”
Peer pressure is not only unpleasant but can actually change your view of a problem. Groups are like mind-altering substances.
We need to create settings in which people are free to circulate in a shifting kaleidoscope of interactions, and to disappear into their private workspaces when they want to focus or simply be alone.
Is Temperament Destiny
Psychologists often discuss the difference between “temperament” and “personality”.
Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioural and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood.
Personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix.
Temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building.
The amygdala is located deep in the limbic system, an ancient brain network found even in primitive animals like mice and rats. This network - sometimes called the “emotional brain” - underlies may of the basic instincts we share with these animals, such as appetite, sex drive, and fear.
The amygdala serves as the brain’s emotional switchboard, receiving information from the senses and then signalling the rest of the brain and nervous system how to respond. (there is some evidence that sociopaths have damaged amygdalae).
The more reactive a child’s amygdala, the higher his heart rate is likely to be and the tighter his vocal cords = more likely to be an introvert when grown up.
Plenty of introverts have the sensitivity of a classic high-reactive.
High-reactive kids also tend to think and feel deeply about that they’ve noticed and bring an extra degree of nuance to everyday experiences.
Results have consistently suggested that introversion and extroversion are about 40 to 50 per cent heritable.
Galen’s Prophecy - Jerome Kagan (great developmental psychologist of 20th century)
Are we really just born with prepackaged temperaments that powerfully shape our personalities?
Studies do show that introverts are significantly more likely than extroverts to fear public speaking.
For introverts there is nothing more exciting than ideas.
It may be that some disadvantaged kids who get into trouble suffer not solely from poverty or neglect, but also from the tragedy of a bold and exuberant temperament deprived of healthy outlets.
Beyond Temperament
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
The footprint of a high or low reactive temperament never disappeared in childhood.
We can stretch our personalities but only up to a point.
Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. Free will can take us far, but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits.
We might call this the “rubber band theory” of personality. We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only so much.
As mammals became more complex, an area of the brain called the neocortex developed. It performs an astonishing array of functions, from deciding which brand of toothpaste to buy, to pondering the nature of reality. One of these functions is to soothe unwarranted fears.
If you were a high-reactive baby then your amygdala may, for the rest of your life, go a bit wild every time you introduce yourself to a stranger at a cocktail party. Your frontal cortex will tell you to calm down, extend a handshake and a smile. (Amygdala vs Neocortex).
High-Reactive people are inhibited.
Introverts appreciate people who listen well.
You can organise your life in terms of what personality psychologists call “optimal levels of arousal” or “sweet spots” and feel more energetic than before.
Your sweet spot is the place where you’re optimally stimulated.
You can set up your work, your hobbies and your social life so that you spend as much time inside your sweet spot as possible.
Overarousal interferes with attention and short-term memory - key components of the ability to speak on the fly.
Introverts will feel much more centred when they truly care about their subject.
Sensitive types think in an unusually complex fashion. They are bored by small talk.
Blushing
People who blush (high-reactives) are judged more positively than others. If you had to ask a single question choose: “What was your last embarrassing experience?”
Then watch very carefully for lip-presses, blushing and averted eyes. The elements of this embarrassment are fleeting statements the individual makes about his or her respect for the judgment of others.
Why did Warren Buffett prosper?
Just as the amygdala of a high-reactive person is more sensitive that average to novelty, so extroverts seem to be more susceptible than introverts to the reward-seeking cravings of the old brain.
Extroverts are characterised by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog status to sexual highs to cold cash.
Dopamine is the “reward chemical” released in response to anticipated pleasures. The more responsive your brain is to dopamine, or the higher the level of dopamine you have available to release, the more likely you are to go after rewards like sex, chocolate, money and status. Cocaine and heroin, which stimulate dopamine-releasing neutrons in humans, make people euphoric.
Extroverts’ dopamine pathways appears to be more active than those of introverts.
Introverts “have a smaller response” in the reward system, and “go less out of their way to follow up (reward) cues”. In short, they don’t buzz as easily.
Introverts seem to be better than extroverts at delaying gratification - a crucial life skill. They are programmed to downplay reward and scan for problems.
Introverts sometimes outperform extroverts on social tasks that require persistence.
“It’s not that I’m so smart,” said Einstein. “It’s that I stay with problems longer.”
Anticipating rewards excites our dopamine-driven reward networks and makes us act more rashly.
“Flow” is an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity - whether long-distance swimming or songwriting, sumo wrestling or sex. In a state of flow, you’re neither bored nor anxious, and you don’t question your own adequacy.
The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings.
Do All Cultures have an extrovert ideal?
Research psychologist Robert McCrae has drawn a map of the world based on personality traits: dark for extroversion, light for introversion. Asia is introverted. Europe and the US are extroverted.
Asian attitudes to the spoken word: talk is for communicating need-to-know information; quiet and introspection are signs of deep thought and higher truth.
Westerners value boldness and verbal skill, traits that promote individuality, while Asians prize quiet, humility and sensitivity, which foster group cohesion.
Asian cultures place tremendous value on harmony within the group.
What looks to Westerners like Asian deference is actually a deeply felt concern for the sensibilities of others.
It’s because of relationship-honouring that Hiroshima victims apologised to each other for surviving.
We can define soft power as “quiet persistence” and this trait lies at the heart of academic excellence. It requires sustained attention.
Conviction is conviction at whatever decibel level it’s described.
When should you act more extroverted?
Personality traits exist; they shape our lives in profound ways; they’re based on physiological mechanisms, and they’re relatively stable across a lifespan.
However, free traits and fixed traits coexist. 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 characters in the service of “core personal projects”.
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.
Still there is a limit to how much we can control our self-presentation. This is because of a phenomenon called behavioural leakage, in which our true selves seep out via unconscious body language.
Studies who that taking simple physical steps - like smiling - makes us feel stronger and happier, while frowning makes us feel worse.
If our interior monologue is: “the route to success is the sort of person I am not”. This is self-negation. Our pseudo-extroversion is not supported by our deeper values.
“I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting. But I was always an expatriate.”
“Restorative niche” is the term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self.
A Free Trait Agreement acknowledges that we’ll act out of character some of the time - in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time.
When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you.
The Communication Gap
Introverts and extroverts are often drawn to each other - in friendship, business and especially romance.
Probably the most common and damaging misunderstanding about personality type is that introverts are antisocial. This is incorrect.
People who value intimacy highly don’t tend to be “the loud, outgoing, life-of-the-party extrovert.”
It can be hard for extroverts to understand how badly introverts need to recharge at the end of a busy day.
It’s hard for introverts to understand just how hurtful their silence can be.
Anger is not just damaging in the moment; for days afterward, venters have repair work to do with their partners. Despite the popular fantasy of fabulous sex after fighting, many couples say that it takes time to feel loving again.
When introverts assume the observer role, as when they write novels, or fall quiet at dinner parties, they’re not demonstrating a failure of will or a lack of energy. They’re simply doing what they’re constitutionally suited for.
“There’s a truism that ‘we have 2 ears and 1 mouth and we should use them proportionately.” I believe that’s what makes someone really good at selling or consulting - the number one thing is they’ve got to listen really well.
How do we cultivate quiet kids in a world that cannot hear them?
Sometimes there is a classic case of poor “parent-child fit” i.e. the same kid in a different home would be a model child.
Don’t mistake your child’s caution in new situations for an inability to relate to others. He’s recoiling from novelty or overstimulation, not from human contact.
Don’t think of introversion as something that needs to be cured.
Studies show that one third to one half of us are introverts. They often have one or two deep interests that are not necessarily shared by their peers.
Those who live the most fully realised lives - giving back to their families, societies and ultimately themselves - tend to find meaning in their obstacles.
CONCLUSION
Carve out restorative niches
Spend your free time the way you like to, not the way you think you’re supposed to
Respect your loved one’s need for socialising or solitude
Remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted.
