(GASPS)
If you take a group of people and have them talk about something,
the opinions of the loudest person
or the most charismatic person or the most assertive person
are the ones that the group tends to follow.
Yet - researchers have looked at this - there's no correlation
between being that best talker and having the best ideas.
Like, zero correlation.
I think that we are living in a society
that is so overly extroverted.
As we shifted from an agricultural economy to a corporate one,
we started to admire people who could be magnetic and charismatic.
These were the qualities that seemed to matter for job interviews.
In the agricultural economy, our self-help books had titles like
"Character: The Grandest Thing In The World".
But then the self-help books became the ones we know today,
like Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends And Influence People".
Those were all about teaching us to be more entertaining,
more dynamic and that kind of thing.
I think, for any trait of human nature, any aspect,
it has its pros and it has its cons.
For too long, we've looked at introversion
only through its disadvantages,
and we've looked at extroversion only through its advantages.
I'm trying to now fill in the gaps and what that can sound like is,
"Down with extroverts, up with introverts!"
My vision of the right world is where it's yin and yang.
There's space for extroverts and for introverts - equal space.
If you look at the birth of the Apple computer,
we tend to associate Apple with Steve Jobs,
who is this dazzling showman.
Really, the person who invented the Apple computer was Steve Wozniak,
who's a self-identified introvert.
He created this amazing thing by sitting by himself
in a cubicle at Hewlett-Packard, where he was working at the time.
Late at night and early in the morning,
he would work by himself for months.
He produced this amazing thing
that he then shared with his friend, Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs said, "We should start a company with this.
"This is amazing."
Without Steve Jobs, none of it ever would have come to pass.
It was this combination of letting the solitary person
go off by himself to think in his deep way
and then having a partnership between the two.
In fact, in companies, it's been found that the most effective teams
are a combination of introvert and extrovert.
The two types are really drawn to each other and need each other.