when I was 9 years old I went off to summer camp for the first time and my
mother packed me his suitcase full of books which to me seemed like a
perfectly natural thing to do because in my family reading was the primary group
activity and this might sound antisocial to you but for us it was really just a
different way of being social you had the animal warmth of your family
sitting right next to you but you were also free to go roaming
around the Adventureland inside your own mind and I had this idea that camp was
going to be just like this but better I
had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their
matching nightgowns camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol and 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 they went like this our owd ie that's the way we spell rowdy
rowdy rowdy let's get rowdy 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 the cheer I recited the cheer along with everybody else I did my
best and I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books 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 our owd ie and then the second time I tried it the
counselor came up to me he was a concerned expression on her face and she
repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all really 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 and I felt
kind of guilty about this I felt as if the books needed me somehow and they
were calling out to me and I was forsaking them but I did forsake them
and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at
the end of the summer now I tell you this story about summer camp I could
have told you fifty 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 and 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 this is what many introverts to you and it's our loss
for sure but it is also our colleagues loss and our community's loss and at the
risk of sounding grandiose it is the world's loss because when it comes to
creativity into leadership we need introverts doing what they do best a
third to a half of the population are introverts a third to a half so that's
one out of every two or three people you know so even if you are an extrovert you
you know I'm talking about your co-workers and your spouses and your
children and the person sitting right next to you right now
all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society we
all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what
we're doing now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion
is and 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
they're most capable when they're in quieter more low-key environments not
all the time you know these things are in 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
are living through this belief system we have a 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