Don’t think of introversion as something that needs to be cured…Spend your free the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.
So the next time you see a person with a compose face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.
The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings.
Because conflict-avoidant Emily would never “bite” or even hiss unless Greg had done something truly horrible, on some level she processes his bite to mean that she’s terribly guilty—of something, anything, who knows what?
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.
Use your natural powers – of persistence, concentration, and insight – to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, and think deeply
There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.
If personal space is vital to creativity, so is freedom from “peer pressure”.
The longer you pause to process surprising or negative feedback, the more likely you are to learn from it.
Introverts need to trust their gut and share their ideas as powerfully as they can.
…I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.
The trick for introverts is to honor their styles instead of allowing themselves to be swept up by prevailing norms.
It’s as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people’s emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world.
He had a courtly way of exclaiming over whatever was exclaimable in people – especially kids.
What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in deliberate practice. This is the key to exceptional achievement.
Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable.
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.
If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent.
We have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionally.
I was the nicest person you’d ever want to know,” Alex recalls, “but the world wasn’t that way. The problem was that if you were just a nice person, you’d get crushed. I refused to live a life where people could do that stuff to me.
In most job interviews, people say they are looking for people skills and emotional intelligence. That’s reasonable, but the question is, how do you define what that looks like?
All personality traits have their good side and their bad side. But for a long time, we’ve seen introversion only through its negative side and extroversion mostly through its positive side.
A widely held, but rarely articulated, belief in our society is that the ideal self is bold, alpha, gregarious. Introversion is viewed somewhere between disappointment and pathology.
In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. We like to think that we value individuality, but mostly we admire the type of individual who’s comfortable ‘putting himself out there.’