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

by Susan Cain

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.

getting up early in the morning just to savor time alone with a steaming cup of coffee. He enjoyed parties, but found himself leaving early. “Other

Congress, he could have safely assumed, is made up of some of the least sensitive people in the country—people

fixed personality traits really exist, or do they shift according to the situation in which people find themselves?

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.”

Free Trait Agreement acknowledges that we’ll each act out of character some of the time—in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time.

Five traits: Introversion-Extroversion; Agreeableness; Openness to Experience; Conscientiousness; and Emotional Stability. (Many personality psychologists believe that human personality can be boiled down to these five characteristics.)

When Jennifer’s after me about something, she’s really after me. If I went to bed without tidying the kitchen, the next morning she’ll shout at me, “This kitchen is filthy!” I come in and look around the kitchen. There are three or four cups out; it’s not filthy. But the drama with which she imbues such moments is natural to her. That’s her way of saying, Gee, when you get a chance I’d appreciate it if you could just tidy up the kitchen a little more. If she did say it that way to me, I would say, I’d be happy to, and I’m sorry that I didn’t do it sooner. But because she comes at me with that two-hundred-mile-per-hour freight-train energy, I want to bridle and say, Too bad. The reason I don’t is because we’ve been married for twenty-five years, and I’ve come to understand that Jennifer didn’t put me in a life-threatening situation when she spoke that way. So what’s John’s secret