years old i went off to summer camp for the first time and my mother packed me a suitcase full of books
which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do
because in my family reading was the primary group activity
i had a vision of ten girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns
r o w d i e that 's the way we spell rowdie rowdie rowdie let 's get rowdie
and i just waited for the time that i could go off and read my books
but the first time that i took my book out of my suitcase the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me why are you being so mellow
mellow of course being the exact opposite of r o w d i e
now i tell you this story about summer camp
i could have told you fifty others just like it
all the times that i got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was
and i was always going off to crowded bars when i really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends and i made these self negating choices so reflexively that i wasn 't even aware that i was making them
now this is what many introverts do and it 's our loss for sure but it is also
our colleagues loss and our communities loss and at the risk of sounding grandiose it is the world 's loss because when it comes to creativity and to leadership we need introverts doing what they do best
so that 's one out of every two or three people you know
so even if you 're an extrovert yourself i 'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society we all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we 're doing
now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion is
it 's different from being shy shyness is about fear of social judgment introversion is more about how do you respond to stimulation including social stimulation
but a lot of the time so the key then
to maximizing our talents
so if you picture the typical classroom nowadays when i was going to school we sat in rows we sat in rows of desks like this and we did most of our work pretty autonomously
but nowadays your typical classroom has pods of desks four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other and kids are working in countless group assignments even in subjects like math and creativewriting which you think would depend on solo flights of thought kids are now expected to act as committee members
and for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone those kids are seen as outliers often or worse as problem cases
and the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable
the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers and when it comes to leadership introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions even though introverts tend to be very careful much less likely to take outsize risks which is something we might all
because when they are managing proactive employees they 're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas whereas an extrovert can quite unwittingly get so excited about things that they 're putting their own stamp on things and other people 's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface
now in fact some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts i 'll give you some examples eleanor roosevelt rosa parks gandhi
and this turns out to have a special power all its own because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at they were there because they had no choice because they were driven to do what they thought was right
i always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts including
my beloved husband
and some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert extrovert spectrum and we call these people ambiverts and i often think that they have the best of all worlds
but many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other and what i 'm saying is that culturally we need a much better balance we need more of a yin and yang between these two types
this is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas but who also have
so darwin he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner party invitations
theodor geisel better known as dr seuss
he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in la jolla california and he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly santa claus like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona
steve wozniak invented the first apple computer sitting alone in his cubical in hewlett packard where he was working at the time and he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up
now
of course this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating and case in point is steve wozniak famously coming together with steve jobs to start apple computer
but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe
if you look at most of the world 's major religions you will find seekers moses jesus buddha muhammad seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community so no wilderness no revelations
this is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology
it turns out that we can 't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring mimicking their opinions even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you 're attracted to you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that 's what you 're doing and
groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room even though there 's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas i mean zero so
and do you really want to leave it up to chance
much better for everybody to go off by themselves generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well managed environment and take it from there
now if all this is true then why are we getting it so wrong
one answer lies deep in our cultural history
western societies and in particular the u s
have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation
and man of contemplation
and they featured role models like abraham lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming ralph waldo emerson called him a man who does not offend by superiority
but then we hit the twentieth century
and so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities and instead of workingalongside people they 've known all their lives now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers so quite understandably qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to
so that 's the world we 're living in today that 's our cultural inheritance
now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant
and i 'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all
that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together but i am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems
so now i 'd like to share with you what 's in my suitcase today
but these are not exactly my books
i brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather 's favorite authors
my grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when i was growing up partly because it was filled with his very gentle very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books
i mean literally every table every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books
just like the rest of my family my grandfather 's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read
but he also loved his congregation
and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the sixty two years that he was a rabbi
he would takes the fruits of each week 's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought and people would come from all over to hear him speak
but here 's the thing about my grandfather
underneath this ceremonial role he was really modest and really introverted so much so that when he delivered these sermons he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for sixty two years and even away from the podium when you called him to say hello
he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time
but when he died at the age of ninety four the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him
and so these days i try to learn from my grandfather 's example in my own way
but now all of a sudden my job is very different and my job is to be out here talking about it
so i prepared for moments like these as best i could i spent the last year
practicing public speaking every chance i could get and i call this my year of speaking dangerously
but i 'll tell you what helps even more is my sense my belief my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change i mean we are and so i am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision
number one stop the madness for constant group work just stop it
okay number two go to the wilderness be like buddha have your own revelations
i 'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again
but i am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often
so extroverts maybe your suitcases are also full of books or maybe they 're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment
whatever it is i hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy
but introverts
but occasionally just occasionally i hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry
so i wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly
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