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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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Susan Cain
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: March 20
Lawyer
Non-Fiction Writer
Writer
Every
Motivation
Bone
Telling
Described
Quiet
Shy
Peopled
Took
Spoken
Rosa
Inspiration
Parks
Gandhi
Though
Soft
Eleanor
Body
Bodies
Roosevelt
Even
Bones
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More quotes by Susan Cain

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In our culture, snails are not considered valiant animals - we are constantly exhorting people to come out of their shells - but there's a lot to be said for taking your home with you wherever you go.
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Solitude matters. And for some people it's the air they breathe.
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I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country.
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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.
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When you go to a football game and someone offers you a beer [...], they're really saying hi, have a glass of extroversion.
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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.
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There are only a few people out there who can completely overcome their fears, and they all live in Tibet.
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Every American was to become a performing self.
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The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting.
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Shyness is inherently uncomfortable introversion is not. The traits do overlap, though psychologists debate to what degree.
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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.
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Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.
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Introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly.
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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?
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...remember the dangers of the New Groupthink. If it's creativity you're after, ask your employees to solve problems alone before sharing their ideas. If you want the wisdom of the crowd, gather it electronically, or in writing, and make sure people can't see each other's ideas until everyone has had a chance to contribute.
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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.
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Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.
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Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.
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In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. We like to think that we value individuality, but mostly we admire the type of individual who’s comfortable putting himself out there.
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There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.
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