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(Finland is a famously introverted nation. Finnish joke: How can you tell if a Finn likes you? He's staring at your shoes instead of his own.)

Susan Cain

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Susan Cain
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: March 20
Lawyer
Non-Fiction Writer
Writer
Instead
Finland
Nations
Introverted
Tell
Staring
Joke
Likes
Shoes
Finnish
Jokes
Famously
Nation
Finn

More quotes by Susan Cain

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It's never a good idea to organize society in a way that depletes the energy of half the population.
Susan Cain
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Every American was to become a performing self.
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What if you love knowledge for its own sake, not necessarily as a blueprint to action? What if you wish there were more, not fewer reflective types in the world?
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One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.
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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 on 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.
Susan Cain
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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 power of quiet.
Susan Cain
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But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.
Susan Cain
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The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.
Susan Cain
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It's not that there is no small talk...It's that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end...Sensitive people...'enjoy small talk only after they've gone deep' says Strickland. 'When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.
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I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas.
Susan Cain
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Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to.
Susan Cain
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In most job interviews, people say they are looking for people skills and emotional intelligence. That's reasonable, but the question is, how do you define what that looks like?
Susan Cain
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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
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Introverts .. may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas.
Susan Cain
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Introverts are offered keys to private gardens full of riches. To possess such a key is to tumble like Alice down her rabbit hole. She didn't choose to go to Wonderland - but she made of it an adventure that was fresh and fantastic and very much her own.
Susan Cain
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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.
Susan Cain
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I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country.
Susan Cain
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I'm insatiably curious about human nature.
Susan Cain
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...true self-esteem comes from competence, not the other way around.
Susan Cain
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Introverts living under the Extroversion Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are.
Susan Cain