Ma. Rocelle Camille N.
Castillo August 7, 2018
10-G Mrs. Kesil Arollado
Susan Cain- Author, “QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop
Talking”
When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother
packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to
do. This might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of
being social.
On the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer
that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp
spirit. And it went like this: “R-O-W-D-I-E, that’s the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie,
rowdie, let’s get rowdie.” Yeah. So I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why we were
supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. But I recited a
cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best.
But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk
came up to me and she asked me, “Why are you being so mellow?” — mellow, of
course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the
counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated
the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.
And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and
there they stayed for the rest of the summer
Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it
— all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of
being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of
an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts
were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I
became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed
to be — partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive
too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to
just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so
reflexively, that I wasn’t even aware that I was making them.
Now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion is. It’s different
from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about,
how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really
crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their
most switched-on and their most capable when they’re in quieter, more low-key
environments. Not all the time — these things aren’t absolute — but a lot of the time.
So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of
stimulation that is right for us.
But now here’s where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools
and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts’ need for
lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new
groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly
gregarious place.
So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in
rows. We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty
autonomously. But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks — four or five
or six or seven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group
assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would
depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members.
And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are
seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers
reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even
though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to
research.
Reference: https://singjupost.com/quiet-power-introverts-susan-cain-transcript/
