Quiet Quotes

“Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“This style of teaching reflects the business community,” one fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan public school told me, “where people’s respect for others is based on their verbal abilities, not their originality or insight. You have to be someone who speaks well and calls attention to yourself. It’s an elitism based on something other than merit.” “Today the world of business works in groups, so now the kids do it in school,” a third-grade teacher in Decatur, Georgia, explained. “Cooperative learning enables skills in working as teams—skills that are in dire demand in the workplace,” writes the educational consultant Bruce Williams.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“You have to be someone who speaks well and calls attention to yourself. It's an elitism based on something other than merit.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Greeters wearing UPW T-shirts and ecstatic smiles line the entrance, springing up and down, fists pumping. You can’t get inside without slapping them five. I know, because I try.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world. —MAHATMA GANDHI”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity the theory of relativity W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Chopin’s nocturnes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Peter Pan Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm The Cat in the Hat Charlie Brown Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“was only once they accepted these two realities that Greg and Emily found a way to break their stalemate. Instead of focusing on the number of dinner parties they’d give, they started talking about the format of the parties. Instead of seating everyone around a big table, which would require the kind of all-hands conversational multitasking Emily dislikes so much, why not serve dinner buffet style, with people eating in small, casual conversational groupings”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Emily lowers her voice and flattens her affect during fights with Greg, she thinks she’s being respectful by taking the trouble not to let her negative emotions show. But Greg thinks she’s checking”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“These findings suggest something very important: introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compete with.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“But without Emily, Greg would feel—paradoxically for such a social creature—alone. Before they met, most of Greg’s girlfriends were extroverts. He says he enjoyed those relationships, but never got to know his girlfriends well, because they were always “plotting how to be with groups of people.” He speaks of Emily with a kind of awe, as if she has access to a deeper state of being. He also describes her as “the anchor” around which his world revolves. Emily, for her part, treasures Greg’s ebullient nature; he makes her feel happy and alive. She has always been attracted to extroverts, who she says “do all the work of making conversation. For them, it’s not work at all.” The trouble is that for most of the five years they’ve been together, Greg and Emily have been having one version or another of the same fight. Greg, a music promoter with a large circle of friends, wants to host dinner parties every Friday—casual, animated get-togethers with heaping bowls of pasta and flowing bottles of wine. He’s been giving Friday-night dinners since he was a senior in college, and they’ve become a highlight of his week and a treasured piece of his identity. Emily has come to dread these weekly events. A hardworking staff attorney for an art museum and a very private person, the last thing she wants to do when she gets home from work is entertain. Her idea of a perfect start to the weekend is a quiet evening at the movies, just her and Greg. It seems an irreconcilable difference: Greg wants fifty-two dinner parties a year, Emily wants zero. Greg says that Emily should make more of an effort. He accuses her of being antisocial. “I am social,” she says. “I love you, I love my family, I love my close friends. I just don’t love dinner parties. People don’t really relate at those parties—they just socialize. You’re lucky because I devote all my energy to you. You spread yours around to everyone.” But Emily soon backs off, partly because she hates fighting, but also because she doubts herself. Maybe I am antisocial, she”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Greg and Emily are an example of an introvert-extrovert couple who love and madden each other in equal measure. Greg, who just turned thirty, has a bounding gait, a mop of dark hair continually falling over his eyes, and an easy laugh. Most people would describe him as gregarious. Emily, a mature twenty-seven, is as self-contained as Greg is expansive. Graceful and soft-spoken, she keeps her auburn hair tied in a chignon, and often gazes at people from under lowered lashes. Greg and Emily complement each other beautifully. Without Greg, Emily might forget to leave the house, except to go to work.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you. You also risk your physical health. “Emotional labor,” which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like an increase in cardiovascular disease. Professor Little believes that prolonged acting out of character may also increase autonomic nervous system activity, which can, in turn, compromise immune functioning.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“If you’re a manager, remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted, whether they appear that way or not. Think twice about how you design your organization’s office space. Don’t expect introverts to get jazzed up about open office plans or, for that matter, lunchtime birthday parties or team-building retreats. Make the most of introverts’ strengths—these are the people who can help you think deeply, strategize, solve complex problems, and spot canaries in your coal mine.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“A reward-sensitive person is highly motivated to seek rewards—from a promotion to a lottery jackpot to an enjoyable evening out with friends. Reward sensitivity motivates us to pursue goals like sex and money, social status and influence.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“how did we go from Character to Personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Even T. S. Eliot’s famous 1915 poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—in which he laments the need to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”—seems a cri de coeur about the new demands of self-presentation.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Why did these leaders’ effectiveness turn on whether their employees were passive or proactive? Grant says it makes sense that introverts are uniquely good at leading initiative-takers. 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.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Men who were too quiet around women risked being thought gay; as a popular 1926 sex guide observed, “homosexuals are invariably timid, shy, retiring.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase” for rewards like money and status. Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits—that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information—make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident—the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“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. Some say that temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building. Kagan’s work helped link certain infant temperaments with adolescent personality styles like those of Tom and Ralph.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to. Stay home on New Year’s Eve if that’s what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story. Make a deal with yourself that you’ll attend a set number of social events in exchange for not feeling guilty when you beg off.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“For many introverts like David, adolescence is the great stumbling place, the dark and tangled thicket of low self-esteem and social unease. In middle and high school, the main currency is vivacity and gregariousness; attributes like depth and sensitivity don’t count for much.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“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”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“It can be hard for extroverts to understand how badly introverts need to recharge at the end of a busy day.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. —LAO ZI, The Way of Lao Zi”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Imagine how much better you’ll be at this sweet-spot game once you’re aware of playing it. You can set up your work, your hobbies, and your social life so that you spend as much time inside your sweet spot as possible. People who are aware of their sweet spots have the power to leave jobs that exhaust them and start new and satisfying businesses. They can hunt for homes based on the temperaments of their family members—with cozy window seats and other nooks and crannies for the introverts, and large, open living-dining spaces for the extroverts.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“by creating as many “restorative niches” as possible in your daily life. “Restorative niche” is Professor Little’s term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking