Great Throughts Treasury

"Amazingly, neuroscientists have even found that people who use Botox, which prevents them from making angry faces, seem to be less anger-prone than those who don?t, because the very act of frowning triggers the amygdala to process negative emotions."

"America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality?and opened up a Pandora?s Box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover."

"Another study, of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors, found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity. 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."

"Aron and a team of scientists have also found that when sensitive people see faces of people experiencing strong feelings, they have more activation than others do in areas of the brain associated with empathy and with trying to control strong emotions. It?s as if, like Eleanor Roosevelt, they can?t help but feel what others feel."

"Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it. If this requires public speaking or networking or other activities that make you uncomfortable, do them anyway. But accept that they're difficult, get the training you need to make them easier, and reward yourself when you're done."

"If you?re an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts. You have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. You enjoy relative freedom from the temptations of superficial prizes like money and status. Indeed, your biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths. You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you undervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you. But when you?re focused on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless. So stay true to your own nature. If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don?t let others make you feel as if you have to race. If you enjoy depth, don?t force yourself to seek breadth. If you prefer single-tasking to multitasking, stick to your guns. Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way. It?s up to you to use that independence to good effect."

"In our culture, guilt is a tainted word, but it?s probably one of the building blocks of conscience. The anxiety these highly sensitive toddlers feel upon apparently breaking the toy gives them the motivation to avoid harming someone?s plaything the next time."

"I was fueled by the same mix of passion and indignation that I imagine inspired Betty Friedan to publish The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Introverts are to extroverts what women were to men at that time--second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent. Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts, and many introverts believe that there is something wrong with them and that they should try to "pass" as extroverts. The bias against introversion leads to a colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness."

"If fast and slow animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don?t get any respect. Slow animals are best described as shy, sensitive types. They don?t assert themselves, but they are observant and notice things that are invisible to the bullies. They are the writers and artists at the party who have interesting conversations out of earshot of the bullies. They are the inventors who figure out new ways to behave, while the bullies steal their patents by copying their behavior."

"If you're an introvert, you also know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain. As a child you might have overheard your parents apologize for your shyness. Or at school you might have been prodded to come out of your shell -that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and some humans are just the same."

"Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone."

"One noteworthy study suggests that people who suppress negative emotions tend to leak those emotions later in unexpected ways. The psychologist Judith Grob asked people to hide their emotions when she showed them disgusting images. She even had them hold pens in their mouths to prevent them from frowning. She found that this group reported feeling less disgusted by the pictures than did those who'd been allowed to react naturally. Later, however, the people who hid their emotions suffered side effects. Their memory was impaired, and the negative emotions they'd suppressed seemed to color their outlook. When Grob had them fill in the missing letter to the word gr_ss, for example, they were more likely than others to offer gross rather than grass. People who tend to [suppress their negative emotions] regularly, concludes Grob, might start to see their world in a more negative light."

"Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves. Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don?t socialize enough."

"Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not over-stimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not."

"The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamp-lit desk. Use your natural powers -- of persistence, concentration, and insight -- to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply."

"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."

"They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions."

"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. (The study?s authors speculate that the decline in empathy is related to the prevalence of social media, reality TV, and hyper-competitiveness.)"

"A mountain of recent data on open-plan offices from many different industries corroborates the results of the games. 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. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They?re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases cortisol, the body?s fight-or-flight stress hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others."

"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."

"A martial arts instructor named Lateesha was first up that evening. Lateesha?s assignment was to read aloud to the class from a Robert Frost poem. With her dreadlocks and wide smile, Lateesha looked as if she wasn?t afraid of anything. But as she got ready to speak, her book propped open at the podium, Charles asked how anxious she was, on a scale of 1 to 10. At least seven, said Lateesha. Take it slow, he said. There are only a few people out there who can completely overcome their fears, and they all live in Tibet."

"Top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption."

"Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or self-contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama. 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."

"A very different study, in which robots interacted with stroke patients during physical rehabilitation exercises, yielded strikingly similar results. Introverted patients responded better and interacted longer with robots that were designed to speak in a soothing, gentle manner: I know it is hard, but remember that it?s for your own good, and, Very nice, keep up the good work. Extroverts, on the other hand, worked harder for robots that used more bracing, aggressive language: You can do more than that, I know it! and Concentrate on your exercise!"

"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."

"A shy man no doubt dreads the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them. He may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence about trifles in the presence of strangers.--Charles Darwin"

"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."

"Aggressive power beats you up; soft power wins you over."

"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"

"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."

"all talking is selling and all selling involves talking,"

"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."

"Alantoa£aon, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy the meeting at parties and business, but after a while if they want to sleep shirts in their homes. They prefer to devote social overworked associates, colleagues and family to their friends, they listen more than speak, and think before you speak, and often feel that they are better at expressing themselves in writing more than a conversation, and they hate conflict, many of them dreaded short dialogue, but have profound debates"

"All of which raises the question, how did we go from Character to Personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?"

"And every day, Don wrestles with himself. Should he go back to his apartment and recharge over a quiet lunch, as he longs to do, or join his classmates?"

"Americans found themselves working no longer with neighbors but with strangers. Citizens morphed into employees, facing the question of how to make a good impression on people to whom they had no civic or family ties."

"America had shifted from what influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a culture of character to a culture of personality, and opened up a Pandora's box of personal anxieties of which we would never recover."

"Any time people come together in a meeting, we're not necessarily getting the best ideas; we're just getting the ideas of the best talkers."

"Aron has noted that sensitive people tend to speak softly because that?s how they prefer others to communicate with them."

"And it suggests, says Jadzia Jagiellowicz, the lead scientist at Stony Brook, that sensitive types think in an unusually complex fashion. It may also help explain why they?re so bored by small talk. If you?re thinking in more complicated ways, she told me, then talking about the weather or where you went for the holidays is not quite as interesting as talking about values or morality."

"As a parent, if give yourself what you need, your children will watch you doing that and will give themselves what they need."

"As Jung felicitously put it, There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum."

"As a young boy, Charles Darwin made friends easily but preferred to spend his time taking long, solitary nature walks. (As an adult he was no different. My dear Mr. Babbage, he wrote to the famous mathematician who had invited him to a dinner party, I am very much obliged to you for sending me cards for your parties, but I am afraid of accepting them, for I should meet some people there, to whom I have sworn by all the saints in Heaven, I never go out.)"

"Ask your child for information in a gentle, nonjudgmental way, with specific, clear questions. Instead of How was your day? try What did you do in math class today? Instead of Do you like your teacher? ask What do you like about your teacher? Or What do you not like so much? Let her take her time to answer. Try to avoid asking, in the overly bright voice of parents everywhere, Did you have fun in school today?! She?ll sense how important it is that the answer be yes."

"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."

"At the height of the crash. Each time someone at the table pressed for more leverage and more risk, the next few years proved them ?right.? These people were emboldened, they were promoted and they gained control of ever more capital. Meanwhile, anyone in power who hesitated, who argued for caution, was proved ?wrong.? The cautious types were increasingly intimidated, passed over for promotion. They lost their hold on capital. This happened every day in almost every financial institution, over and over, until we ended up with a very specific kind of person running"

"At the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, McAdams studies the stories that people tell about themselves. We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing (I was never the same again after my wife left me), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise (The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I?m so much happier with my new wife). Those who live the most fully realized lives?giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves?tend to find meaning in their obstacles. In a sense, McAdams has breathed new life into one of the great insights of Western mythology: that where we stumble is where our treasure lies."

"At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability."

"At the onset of the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for frankly selfish reasons?as a way of outshining the crowd in a newly anonymous and competitive society."

"Bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them in energy, authenticity, and even physical health."