Adding an Excerpt to My Book's Page

[Benjamin]

Subject: Request to Add Book Excerpt

Hello Goodreads Team,

I am the author of The Satisfied Introvert (New and Expanded Edition), and I’d like to request that an excerpt be added to my book’s page.

Here is the book’s Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Here is the excerpt I would like displayed:

Introduction
My Quiet Beginnings

When I was four years old, I ran away from home. I had to get away from my mother, who I knew loved me dearly but was so vivacious and talkative that I felt overwhelmed by the unbearable noise of being around her.

My destination was the house next door, where an elderly couple who always doted on me lived. Not only was their house much quieter than ours, but also they had a plywood scale model of a building complex under their bed. It was beautifully crafted, although unpainted, and I never tired of them bringing it out for me to see. The man was an architect and for years that was what I wanted to be too.

I had some serious parent exchanging to do so I planned well for the journey. I found a large brown bag from Von’s grocery store and threw in all the essentials: a pair of underwear, a t-shirt, two bright copper pennies that I had been saving for an emergency such as this, a stuffed dog named Woofie, and some canned goods (although I could not read the labels and had no clue how to get them open—that was what new parents were for).

Thus prepared, I left the house. Dad was out and Mom was cleaning, so my daring escape was fairly easy. The bag, however, was too heavy to carry, so I dragged it across the rough pavement of the driveway. By the time I got to the curb, a hole had appeared; halfway to the neighbors’ house, the bottom fell out and everything spilled into the street.
Devastated that I was never going to make it, I sat down on the curb to figure out what to do. I can still see the sun glinting off the shiny pennies, their image becoming blurred and then washed away by the tears in my eyes.

I sat there and cried, feeling discouraged—by running away I had distanced myself from my mother’s love, and now felt unappreciated by both sets of parents. I was sliding deeply into the despair of having no one to love me when I felt my mother’s arms picking me up and holding me to her breast, soothing me and telling me she loved me more than anything in the world. Ever alert, she had noticed my absence within sixty seconds and, with her warmth and sweet words, made all the hurt and fear go away.

She carried me back into the house and sat with me for the longest time, stroking my back and holding my head against her chest, making me feel like the most special and wanted little boy who ever lived. Dad soon came home carrying my precious belongings from the street and joined us where we sat. He put his arms around me and said beautiful things too.
Never again did I entertain the thought of leaving them for a quiet space and pieces of plywood.

Even today, I look back on that moment as the time when I learned what love was, and commitment, and the willingness to drop everything to make a difference in the life of a child.

During my escape, I discovered that I am an introvert. I did not know the word then, but I did know that I did not like being around other people all that much. The noise was too emotionally stimulating, filling me with painful anxiety. I much preferred to live inside my head, looking at books and thinking.

As I grew older, this personality trait became a problem as I came to realize society had designed the world for extroverts. I noticed that in school, teachers emphasized quick participation over slow reflection. Outside of class, small talk was a social obligation, and almost everyone celebrated loud, charismatic people. Overall, I sensed that the ideal personality was seen as outgoing.

Writer Susan Cain points out in her bestselling book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, “Many of the most important institutions of contemporary life are designed for those who enjoy group projects and high levels of stimulation.” In contrast, most introverts prefer less external stimulation and more silence.

In reading her book, I saw other traits that described me with uncanny accuracy:
• listening more than talking, and thinking before speaking
• expressing myself better in writing than in discussions
• detesting conflict
• hating small talk, preferring deep conversations
• concentrating on one thing at a time, working slowly, and being able to focus deeply on the task at hand

Introvert children are encouraged from a young age to be more extroverted. Relatives admonish shyness. “Ben, why don’t you go play with the kids down the street?” Strangers bend over backward to coax a smile or a giggle. “You’re so serious, Ben, can you give me a smile?” Educators urge quiet children to be more expressive. “Speak up, Ben, so the whole class can hear you.”

My first recollection of developing and implementing a plan to overcome what I perceived to be a weakness and appear more extroverted happened one Friday afternoon in 1953 when I was ten. My teacher told our Los Angeles public school class that each of us would have to pick a current event and report on it—without notes, standing in front of the room—that coming Monday.

I was terrified. But that afternoon, I calmed down. I realized that to get through this I needed to have some kind of a plan. I looked in the newspaper and found an article about our new president that interested me. I cut it out along with Eisenhower’s picture and underlined the main points. I then walked into our garage and—amid the scent of engine oil—rehearsed the points out loud twenty-five times. Over the three chilly fall evenings that remained before Monday, I memorized my script.

The results astounded me. On Monday, I stood at the front of my classroom, panning my vision from the floor to the walls to the ceiling—anywhere but at the faces of my audience. The knowledge that I had memorized everything I needed to say diluted my fear, and helped me to engage the class. By the end of my presentation, I’d put a beaming smile on my teacher’s face.

This strategy—defining a sequence of steps (finding an article, memorizing the material in it ahead of my performance, and not looking into the eyes of anyone in the audience) shifted my focus from the external world, where I was nervous, to the internal one, where I was confident.
In junior high, a similar process helped me to do particularly well in Spanish. Grammar and pronunciation had rules, and sometimes, even the exceptions had rules. For two years, I listed and rehearsed the rules, and soon I found myself speaking the language. My teachers—Ms. Romero and Mr. Mendoza—shook their heads at what this gringo kid was able to do.

Skinny and bespectacled, I became a process fanatic. In high school, I created one for every class—to learn the valences of chemical atoms, reconstruct the history of the United States, and solve quadratic equations. I broke each task down, put it back together as a series of steps, and then completed those steps in order.

This allowed me to interact with the world and get predictable outcomes without having to focus too much on people. I only had to complete the steps I had identified, and results would appear at the end. People came to me with praise, which was not as emotionally disruptive as having to interact with them to get outcomes.

All this compensated nicely for something that, at age four, I had decided was wrong with me—that as an introvert I did not have what it took to “win” in life on my own. Without a process in hand, I had had to improvise, failing often, and that was scary. But with a procedure of some kind I could get results, and that made me feel safe.

The more processes I created, the more my grades soared. I became co-valedictorian of my high school class, went on to graduate magna cum laude from Stanford, and was accepted to the Harvard Business School.
I concluded that using processes was a terrific way for me to “win.” Never mind that I had almost no friends, was socially inept, and got nowhere with girls. I had my lists of steps and believed those were all I needed to navigate the minefields of a world that constantly pushed me to be more extroverted. I was convinced that my lists would bring me security and ultimate success in life.

My theory is that as a quiet child you, too, decided early on to cover up what you believed was wrong with you—that you were not outgoing enough to succeed in an extroverted world.

To survive its intrusive noise and to ensure you did not experience it again, you likely created a “winning recipe” or mask of some kind, as I did, that
allowed you to feel secure by projecting more sociability than you really felt. It allowed you to act in a more acceptable way than if you allowed your authentic self to come out.

Throughout this book, I’ll use the term “recipe” to describe the survival strategy I built as an introvert to survive in an extroverted world. What I built didn’t present the real me, but instead a façade that allowed me to navigate relationships and situations while protecting myself.

A winning recipe is not a separate personality, but a socially adapted version of your true self, consciously or habitually shaped to meet external expectations, or handle specific situations. Unlike multiple personalities, which involve distinct identities, a recipe exists within a single, unified self and does not involve a loss of memory, awareness, or control.

Thousands of winning recipes exist. We embrace things like: be diplomatic, be thorough, be likable, be relentless, be dependable. The list is as extensive and varied as the entire introvert population. That Friday afternoon in 1953 as I faced needing to report on a news story in front of a live audience, I discovered my own winning recipe: be methodical.

I believe that all people, not just introverts, have created a recipe of some sort—being formal, being cute, being helpful, being precise, or any of the thousands of possible recipes that introverts tend to create. Extroverts tend to use theirs to compensate for any defect detected in childhood that they believed would prevent them from “winning” in life. Introverts, on the other hand, tend to compensate for something much narrower: simply not being outgoing enough to succeed in the world.

An introvert’s recipe is ultimately about safety. It parades as a safe way for you to be more successful in the world. That is a large part of the hold it has over you. In situations where the recipe is inappropriate, or otherwise does not work, you will likely feel defenseless. As you will see in the story, my recipe led me into failed relationships, the wrong career, and limited self-awareness. It could not cope with solitude, fear, danger, or vulnerability. Yet it always insisted that I follow its advice.
When you are in that state, despite how often the recipe has failed you in the past, it will still make a loud claim to be your safest strategy for success. In the pages of this book you’ll see how this has played out many times throughout my life.

If you are a dissatisfied introvert, your recipe may be the reason.


Please let me know if you need anything further to process this request. Thank you very much for your assistance.

Sincerely,
Benjamin Plumb

[Shim]

I do not believe we have a way of adding excerpts to books on Goodreads. You can add short quotations only.