
#366/365 Paintings
Susan Cain. “Quiet” the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking
“Poets and philosophers have been thinking about introverts and extroverts since the dawn of recorded time. Both personalities appear in the Bible and in the writings of Greek and Roman physicians, and some evolutionary psychologists say that the history of these types reaches back even farther than that: the animal kingdom also boasts “introverts” and “extroverts,” and we’ll see from fruit flies to pumpkinseed fish to rhesus monkeys.Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts—which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are. Depending upon which study you consult, one third to one half of Americans are introverts—in other words one out of every two or three people you know. {…}If these statistics surprise you, that’s probably because so many people pretend to be extroverts.