Carly Simon once sang, "You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you."I can relate.I thought Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts was totally about me.And in many ways, it was. Her book explained so completely the thoughts and actions and life of an introvert---what we value, what we shirk from, what gives us meaning and joy and fulfillment---it was like a generic biography of me. And thousands of others. Thousands of us introverts probably thought this book was about us because Cain did such a fabulous job explaining our ins and outs.Take this excerpt on highly sensitive people, for instance.Highly sensitive people ...

• tend to be keen observers who look before they leap.
• They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises.
• They’re often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee.
• They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews).
• The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic.
• They dislike small talk.
• They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive.
• They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day.
• They love music, nature, art, physical beauty.
• They feel exceptionally strong emotions—sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.
• Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments—both physical and emotional—unusually deeply.
• They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.

Yes, to all.Quiet not only gave me confidence in who I am, but it also gave me empathy for others. I now notice the many different ways a room can affect the moods of others, I relate better to the way certain people crave solitude and others crave relationship, and I have a greater appreciation for what each person brings to the table---conversation, creativity, laughter, quiet, ideas, action, introspection, rest.  

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

The following are excerpts taken from Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Bold and italics are mine.

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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 in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.--Many of these guides were written for businessmen, but women were also urged to work on a mysterious quality called “fascination.”--The U.S. Army has a name for a similar phenomenon: “the Bus to Abilene.”Via Colonel (Ret.) Stephen J. Gerras, a professor of behavioral sciences at the U.S. Army War College:

Any army officer can tell you what that means. It’s about a family sitting on a porch in Texas on a hot summer day, and somebody says, "I’m bored. Why don’t we go to Abilene?" When they get to Abilene, somebody says, "You know, I didn’t really want to go." And the next person says, "I didn’t want to go—I thought you wanted to go," and so on. Whenever you’re in an army group and somebody says, "I think we’re all getting on the bus to Abilene here," that is a red flag. You can stop a conversation with it. It is a very powerful artifact of our culture.

The “Bus to Abilene” anecdote reveals our tendency to follow those who initiate action—any action.--When Jim Collins analyzed what the highest-performing companies had in common, the nature of their CEOs jumped out at him. Every single one of them was led by an unassuming man like Darwin Smith. Those who worked with these leaders tended to describe them with the following words: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated. The lesson, says Collins, is clear. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.--Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions. Having benefited from the talents of their followers, they are then likely to motivate them to be even more proactive. Introverted leaders create a virtuous circle of proactivity, in other words.--The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend these relationships into the real world.--Bloggers started posting about their experiences, written evidence of the schism between introverts and extroverts within the evangelical church finally emerged. One blogger wrote about his “cry from the heart wondering how to fit in as an introvert in a church that prides itself on extroverted evangelism. There are probably quite a few [of you] out there who are put on guilt trips each time [you] get a personal evangelism push at church. There’s a place in God’s kingdom for sensitive, reflective types. It’s not easy to claim, but it’s there.”--Events like this don’t give me the sense of oneness others seem to enjoy; 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 communication in the midst of solitude.” His use of religious language was surely no accident.--In Steve Wozniak's memoir, he offers this advice to kids who aspire to great creativity:

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee.I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee.If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take.That advice is: 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.

If this is true—if 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.--The New Groupthink is also practiced in our schools, via an increasingly popular method of instruction called “cooperative” or “small group” learning. In many elementary schools, the traditional rows of seats facing the teacher have been replaced with “pods” of four or more desks pushed together to facilitate countless group learning activities. Even subjects like math and creative writing, which would seem to depend on solo flights of thought, are often taught as group projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited, a big sign announced the “Rules for Group Work,” including, YOU CAN’T ASK A TEACHER FOR HELP UNLESS EVERYONE IN YOUR GROUP HAS THE SAME QUESTION.--I wonder whether students like the young safety officer would be better off if we appreciated that not everyone aspires to be a leader in the conventional sense of the word—that some people wish to fit harmoniously into the group, and others to be independent of it. Often the most highly creative people are in the latter category.--Many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers.”--Jason Fried of 37 Signals prefers passive forms of collaboration like e-mail, instant messaging, and online chat tools. His advice for other employers? “Cancel your next meeting,” he advises. “Don’t reschedule it. Erase it from memory.” He also suggests “No-Talk Thursdays,” one day a week in which employees aren’t allowed to speak to each other.--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. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind.… That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

--The author of the Cat in the Hat rarely ventured out in public to meet his young readership, fretting that kids would expect a merry, outspoken, Cat in the Hat–like figure, and would be disappointed with his reserved personality.“In mass, [children] terrify me,” he admitted.--Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming.

1. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work.
2. The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively.
3. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one’s peers.

--

Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.

- Robert Rubin, In an Uncertain World--Psychologists often discuss the difference between “temperament” and “personality.” Temperament refers to inborn, biologically-based behavioral 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.--Kagan must be observing this too—he says as much, nodding at me as he notes that many high-reactives become writers or pick other intellectual vocations where “you’re in charge: you close the door, pull down the shades and do your work. You’re protected from encountering unexpected things.”--

The stereotype of the university professor is accurate for so many people on campus. They like to read; for them there’s nothing more exciting than ideas. And some of this has to do with how they spent their time when they were growing up. If you spend a lot of time charging around, then you have less time for reading and learning. There’s only so much time in your life.

- Jerry Miller, director of the Center for the Child and the Family at the University of Michigan--According to Jay Belsky, a leading proponent of this view and a psychology professor and child care expert at the University of London, the reactivity of these kids’ nervous systems makes them quickly overwhelmed by childhood adversity, but also able to benefit from a nurturing environment more than other children do. In other words, orchid children are more strongly affected by all experience, both positive and negative.--High-reactive kids who enjoy good parenting, child care, and a stable home environment tend to have fewer emotional problems and more social skills than their lower-reactive peers, studies show.Often they’re exceedingly empathic, caring, and cooperative. They work well with others. They are kind, conscientious, and easily disturbed by cruelty, injustice, and irresponsibility. They’re successful at the things that matter to them. --The parents of high-reactive children are exceedingly lucky, Belsky told me.“The time and effort they invest will actually make a difference."Instead of seeing these kids as vulnerable to adversity, parents should see them as malleable—for worse, but also for better.”--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, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.”--Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead.A sizable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.--The word that Kagan first used to describe high-reactive people was inhibited, and that’s exactly how I still feel at some dinner parties.--There’s a host of evidence that introverts are more sensitive than extroverts to various kinds of stimulation, from coffee to a loud bang to the dull roar of a networking event.--Your friend—an extrovert who needs much more stimulation than you do—persuades you to accompany her to a block party, where you’re now confronted by loud music and a sea of strangers. Your friend’s neighbors seem affable enough, but you feel pressured to make small talk above the din of music. Now—bang, just like that—you’ve fallen out of your sweet spot, except this time you’re overstimulated. And you’ll probably feel that way until you pair off with someone on the periphery of the party for an in-depth conversation, or bow out altogether and return to your novel. Imagine how much better you’ll be at this sweet-spot game once you’re aware of playing it.--What is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren’t very pleased about it?--Elaine Aron boiled their responses down to a constellation of twenty-seven attributes. She named the people who embodied these attributes “highly sensitive.”--The other thing Aron found about sensitive people is that sometimes they’re highly empathic. It’s as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people’s emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. They tend to have unusually strong consciences. They avoid violent movies and TV shows; they’re acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior. In social settings they often focus on subjects like personal problems, which others consider “too heavy.”--

He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men.”

- novelist Eric MalpassThe description of such characters as thin-skinned is meant metaphorically, but it turns out that it’s actually quite literal. Among the tests researchers use to measure personality traits are skin conductance tests, which record how much people sweat in response to noises, strong emotions, and other stimuli. High-reactive introverts sweat more; low-reactive extroverts sweat less. Their skin is literally “thicker,” more impervious to stimuli, cooler to the touch. In fact, according to some of the scientists I spoke to, this is where our notion of being socially “cool” comes from; the lower-reactive you are, the cooler your skin, the cooler you are.--Maybe they’re not even introverts—only 70 percent of sensitive people are, according to Aron, while the other 30 percent are extroverts (although this group tends to report craving more downtime and solitude than your typical extrovert).--Aron has noted that sensitive people tend to speak softly because that’s how they prefer others to communicate with them.--Strickland: “When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.”--Psychologists call this the “person-situation” debate: Do fixed personality traits really exist, or do they shift according to the situation in which people find themselves?Little believes that personality traits exist, that they shape our lives in profound ways, that they’re based on physiological mechanisms, and that they’re relatively stable across a lifespan. Those who take this view stand on broad shoulders: Hippocrates, Milton, Schopenhauer, Jung, and more recently the prophets of fMRI machines and skin conductance tests.On the other side of the debate are a group of psychologists known as the Situationists. Situationism posits that our generalizations about people, including the words we use to describe one another—shy, aggressive, conscientious, agreeable—are misleading. There is no core self; there are only the various selves of Situations X, Y, and Z.--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 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.--The so-called Big Five traits:

1. Introversion-Extroversion
2. Agreeableness
3. Openness to Experience
4. Conscientiousness
5. Emotional Stability

(Many personality psychologists believe that human personality can be boiled down to these five characteristics.)--And if she or anyone else comments on her quietness or hesitancy, Jim’s prompt reply is, "That’s just your style. Other people have different styles. But this is yours. You like to take your time and be sure."--One of the best things you can do for an introverted child is to work with him on his reaction to novelty. Remember that introverts react not only to new people, but also to new places and events. So 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.As we saw in the last chapter, introversion-extroversion levels are not correlated with either agreeableness or the enjoyment of intimacy. Introverts are just as likely as the next kid to seek others’ company, though often in smaller doses. The key is to expose your child gradually to new situations and people—taking care to respect his limits, even when they seem extreme.This produces more-confident kids than either overprotection or pushing too hard. Let him know that his feelings are normal and natural, but also that there’s nothing to be afraid of: “I know it can feel funny to play with someone you’ve never met, but I bet that boy would love to play trucks with you if you asked him.”Go at your child’s pace; don’t rush him.If he’s young, make the initial introductions with the other little boy if you have to. And stick around in the background—or, when he’s really little, with a gentle, supportive hand on his back—for as long as he seems to benefit from your presence. When he takes social risks, let him know you admire his efforts: “I saw you go up to those new kids yesterday. I know that can be difficult, and I’m proud of you.”Look for a school that prizes independent interests and emphasizes autonomy conducts group activities in moderation and in small, carefully managed groups values kindness, caring, empathy, good citizenship insists on orderly classrooms and hallways is organized into small, quiet classes chooses teachers who seem to understand the shy/serious/introverted/sensitive temperament focuses its academic/athletic/extracurricular activities on subjects that are particularly interesting to your child strongly enforces an anti-bullying program emphasizes a tolerant, down-to-earth culture attracts like-minded peers, for example intellectual kids, or artistic or athletic ones, depending on your child’s preference.--Introverts often stick with their enthusiasms. This gives them a major advantage as they grow, because true self-esteem comes from competence, not the other way around. Researchers have found that intense engagement in and commitment to an activity is a proven route to happiness and well-being.--You can buy the book here. :)