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Introversion - along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness - is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.

Susan Cain

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Susan Cain
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: March 20
Lawyer
Non-Fiction Writer
Writer
Along
Trait
Second
Seriousness
Class
Sensitivity
Cousin
Introversion
Traits
Sociability
Disappointment
Pathology
Somewhere
Cousins
Personality
Shyness

More quotes by Susan Cain

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[Introverts,] the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly.
Susan Cain
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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.
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'm insatiably curious about human nature.
Susan Cain
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We have a two-tier class system when it comes to personality style. To devalue introversion is a waste of talent, energy and happiness.
Susan Cain
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We often marvel at how introverted, geeky, kid 'blossom' into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it's not the children who change but their environments. As adults they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don't have to live in whatever culture they'er plunked into.
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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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.
Susan Cain
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Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases ... If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.
Susan Cain
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I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.
Susan Cain
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When you're more focused in getting your message across than you are worrying about how people are viewing you, that's huge.
Susan Cain
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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.
Susan Cain
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What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.
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
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Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.
Susan Cain
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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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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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Scores of studies have shown that venting doesn't soothe anger it fuels it.
Susan Cain
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The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor Paradise Lost was dashed off by a party animal.
Susan Cain
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...true self-esteem comes from competence, not the other way around.
Susan Cain