Quiet Quotes

“Agreeable people are warm, supportive, and loving; personality psychologists have found that if you sit them down in front of a computer screen of words, they focus longer than others do on words like caring, console, and help, and a shorter time on words like abduct, assault, and harass. Introverts and extroverts are equally likely to be agreeable; there is no correlation between extroversion and agreeableness. This explains why some extroverts love the stimulation of socializing but don’t get along particularly well with those closest to them.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“So the next time you see a person with a composed 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.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Career counselor Shoya Zichy told me the story of one of her clients, an introverted financial analyst who worked in an environment where she was either presenting to clients or talking to colleagues who continually cycled in and out of her office. She was so burned out that she planned to quit her job—until Zichy suggested that she negotiate for downtime.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Alex also took advantage of his natural strengths. “I learned that boys basically do only one thing: they chase girls. They get them, they lose them, they talk about them. I was like, ‘That’s completely circuitous. I really like girls.’ That’s where intimacy comes from. So rather than sitting around and talking about girls, I got to know them. I used having relationships with girls, plus being good at sports, to have the guys in my pocket. Oh, and every once in a while, you have to punch people. I did that, too.” Today Alex has a folksy, affable, whistle-while-you-work”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Shakespeare’s oft-quoted advice, “To thine own self be true,” runs deep in our philosophical DNA. Many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of taking on a “false” persona for any length of time. And if we act out of character by convincing ourselves that our pseudo-self is real, we can eventually burn out without even knowing why. The genius of Little’s theory is how neatly it resolves this discomfort. Yes, we are only pretending to be extroverts, and yes, such inauthenticity can be morally ambiguous (not to mention exhausting), but if it’s in the service of love or a professional calling, then we’re doing just as Shakespeare advised.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“How is it that Asians and Westerners can look at the exact same classroom interactions, and one group will label it “class participation” and the other “talking nonsense”? The Journal of Research in Personality has published an answer to this question in the form of a map of the world drawn by research psychologist Robert McCrae.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“A local college counselor named Purvi Modi agrees. “Introversion is not looked down upon,” she tells me. “It is accepted. In some cases it is even highly respected and admired. It is cool to be a Master Chess Champion and play in the band.” There’s an introvert-extrovert spectrum here, as everywhere, but it’s as if the population is distributed a few extra degrees toward the introverted end of the scale.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Even multitasking, that prized feat of modern-day office warriors, turns out to be a myth. Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent. Many introverts seem to know these things instinctively,”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Functional, moderate guilt,” writes Kochanska, “may promote future altruism, personal responsibility, adaptive behavior in school, and harmonious, competent, and prosocial relationships with parents, teachers, and friends.” This is an especially important set of attributes at a time when a 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Extroverts, in other words, are characterized by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog status to sexual highs to cold cash. They’ve been found to have greater economic, political, and hedonistic ambitions than introverts; even their sociability is a function of reward-sensitivity, according to this view—extroverts socialize because human connection is inherently gratifying.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“But it turned out that this “unlearning” was not as complete as the scientists first thought. When they severed the neural connections between the rats’ cortex and amygdala, the rats became afraid of the sound again. This was because the fear conditioning had been suppressed by the activity of the cortex, but was still present in the amygdala. In humans with unwarranted fears, like batophobia, or fear of heights, the same thing happens. Repeated trips to the top of the Empire State Building seem to extinguish the fear, but it may come roaring back during times of stress—when the cortex has other things to do than soothe an excitable amygdala.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The upsides of the high-reactive temperament have been documented in exciting research that scientists are only now beginning to pull together. One of the most interesting findings, also reported in Dobbs’s Atlantic article, comes from the world of rhesus monkeys, a species that shares about 95 percent of its DNA with humans and has elaborate social structures that resemble our own.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything. —ROBERT RUBIN, In an Uncertain World”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Osborn’s theory had great impact, and company leaders took up brainstorming with enthusiasm. To this day, it’s common for anyone who spends time in corporate America to find himself occasionally cooped up with colleagues in a room full of whiteboards, markers, and a preternaturally peppy facilitator encouraging everyone to free-associate. There’s only one problem with Osborn’s breakthrough idea: group brainstorming doesn’t actually work.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn’t worked together. That’s because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“But exceptional performance depends not only on the groundwork we lay through Deliberate Practice; it also requires the right working conditions. And in contemporary workplaces, these are surprisingly hard to come by.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The New Groupthink did not arise at one precise moment. Cooperative learning, corporate teamwork, and open office plans emerged at different times and for different reasons. But the mighty force that pulled these trends together was the rise of the World Wide Web, which lent both cool and gravitas to the idea of collaboration.”
― 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.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“From outside the evangelical community, this seems an astonishing confession. Since when is solitude one of the Seven Deadly Sins? But to a fellow evangelical, McHugh’s sense of spiritual failure would make perfect sense. Contemporary evangelicalism says that every person you fail to meet and proselytize is another soul you might have saved.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed. Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only fifty-five percent, say it as if you believe it a hundred percent.” “If you’re preparing alone for class, then you’re doing it wrong. Nothing at HBS is intended to be done alone.” “Don’t think about the perfect answer. It’s better to get out there and say something than to never get your voice in.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“So? You don’t have to be an extrovert to feel alive!” True enough. But it seems, according to Tony, that you’d better act like one if you don’t want to flub the sales call and watch your family die like pigs in hell.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Social anxiety disorder”—which essentially means pathological shyness—is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us. The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist’s bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology—not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease—if it interferes with the sufferer’s job performance.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“At IBM, a corporation that embodied the ideal of the company man, the sales force gathered each morning to belt out the company anthem, “Ever Onward,” and to harmonize on the “Selling IBM” song, set to the tune of “Singin’ in the Rain.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Carnegie’s metamorphosis from farmboy to salesman to public-speaking icon is also the story of the rise of the Extrovert Ideal. Carnegie’s journey reflected a cultural evolution that reached a tipping point around the turn of the twentieth century, changing forever who we are and whom we admire, how we act at job interviews and what we look for in an employee, how we court our mates and raise our children.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual—the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Buffett is known for thinking carefully when those around him lose their heads. “Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ,” he has said. “Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. Although flow does not depend on being an introvert or an extrovert, many of the flow experiences that Csikszentmihalyi writes about are solitary pursuits that have nothing to do with reward-seeking: reading, tending an orchard, solo ocean cruising. Flow often occurs, he writes, in conditions in which people “become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“What is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren't very pleased about it?”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Big Five traits: Introversion-Extroversion; Agreeableness; Openness to Experience; Conscientiousness; and Emotional Stability.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking