Introvert or Extrovert - What Are You?
Lex Fridman Podcast | Susan Cain
Hello friends!
So I messaged my Mum for a quick take on this email's title. Oops! Back came a 2-minute voice note railing against the fallacy of psychological classification.
Lesson learned: nuance is key. In this week’s spotlight, author Susan Cain discusses personality with Lex Fridman, and surprise, surprise – it turns out we're all a bit AMBIVERT!
Ambivert: a person who has a balance of extrovert and introvert features in their personality.
Why does it matter? I believe personality is why some founders press on instead of giving up. Why some bosses inspire whilst others cause chaos. In business, our personality isn’t just a side note; it’s the main character in the drama. And no single personality type guarantees success. As the story of CEO Doug Conant shows below, you don’t have to be the classic extrovert to lead a business well. 💌
Lex Fridman: You've written on your website, "I prefer listening to talking, reading to socializing and cozy chats to group settings."
What’s a good definition of an introvert, are these three things a good start?
Susan Cain: It’s a good start in terms of how introverts experience day-to-day life. I think a good definition is one that some of your listeners will have heard many times before. It’s the idea — where do you get your energy?
Some people get their energy more from quieter settings, and for other people, they get it more from being out there. So a good rule of thumb is to to imagine you're at a party you're really enjoying, and you've been there for about 2 hours or so, and it's with people you really like, and it's in your favorite place, so it's all good. An extrovert in a setting like that is going to feel charged up and they're going to be looking for the after party. And an introvert, no matter how good a time they're having and how socially skilled they are, there's this moment where you wish you could teleport and be back at home.
Lex Fridman: And the time before the start of the party to the time when that moment happens is different for different people. So the shorter it is, the more of an introvert you are?
Susan Cain: Yes, and then for extroverts, it's the opposite, right? Maybe they're focused on producing a memo that's intensely interesting to them. But if they're in a solitary mode of really focusing, they might get stir crazy a lot faster than an introvert would. So it doesn't have so much to do with what you're good at as how you get your energy.
Lex Fridman: So for an introvert, the source of energy is what…silence, solitude? and for an extrovert, it's interaction with other people?
Susan Cain: What I'd really say is that, and this is neurobiological as well, it has to do with how your nervous system reacts to stimulation. So for an introvert, you're feeling in a great state of equilibrium when there are fewer inputs coming at you. So they could be social inputs, but that's why an introvert in general would rather hang out with one close friend at a time as opposed to a big party full of strangers because that's just too many inputs for the nervous system. But for an extrovert, the nervous system needs more stimulants. So if they're not getting enough, they get that listless and sluggish feeling.
Lex Fridman: In general, how do you know if you're an introvert? How do you empirically start to determine if you are, in large part, an introvert?
Susan Cain: I'm curious if you have a different experience from this, but from all the years that I've been out there talking about this topic, I’ve found that most people seem to know once they're being honest with themselves. And maybe the question to ask is — if you imagine that you have a Saturday or a whole weekend where you can spend your time exactly the way you want to with no professional obligations, no social obligations, who would you spend it with, how many people, what would you be doing, and what does that picture you're painting start to look like?
Lex Fridman: Yes, but there's nuance to this though, because I'm sure for extroverts to get energized by stimulation, whether that's stimulation with other people, it depends what that stimulation is. Maybe you're not surrounded by the kind of people that you enjoy being around. So that might have less to do with some characteristics of your personality, but more to do with what your environment is like. Do you want to be alone because everybody around you is an asshole, or do you want to be alone because you get energized from being alone? Then there's the other thing you observed that there are people who will say they get energized from being alone. But at the same time, when you see them at a party, they seem like the life of the party! What would you classify them as exactly? Is it ultimately to do with the source of their energy?
Susan Cain: It's a bunch of different things. First of all, a big caveat to all of this is humans are just amazingly complex. So you can't explain every individual human through these parameters, even though I think the parameters are really valuable. That person at the party, it could be that they're more of an ambivert, so they may be in the middle of the spectrum. An ambivert basically means someone who's not extremely introverted or extremely extroverted, they're kind of in the middle. So at a party, their more extroverted side comes out. Or it could be an introvert who's got really good at the skills of acting more like a pseudo extrovert, and they pull that up in the moments they need it.
Lex Fridman: One of the things you talk about, at least in the West, is that we've constructed a picture of success, and that picture is usually one of an extrovert. When you imagine somebody who is a leader, who is a successful person, that person most often has qualities you would associate with an extrovert. So there's a lot of incentive for faking it. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to be able to fake it, to sort of hang with the rest of the team, you have to be able to be outgoing and not be drained by the interaction.
Susan Cain: Yes, but there are also a lot of introverts who figure out ways to draw on their own strengths and they're incredibly connecting and successful and they're great leaders and they're not actually faking it. They're more just figuring out ways to do it their own way. You see a lot of people like that.
Lex Fridman: Are there lessons you can draw from that, from observing how you can be an introvert and be in a leadership position?
Susan Cain: Yes, it's about figuring out what your own strengths are and how to draw on them. A good example is Doug Conant, who had been the CEO of Campbell Soup for many years. He's very introverted and he's quite shy by his own description. At the same time he really cares about people. When he started at Campbell, the employee engagement ratings of the company were all the way at the bottom of the Fortune 500. But by the time he stepped down, 10 years later, they were all the way at the top. And it wasn't that he was going out there and schmoozing people, but he really did care. So he would find out who were the people who had been contributing, and he would write to them personal letters of thanks. These letters meant so much to people they would carry them around with them. And during his time, in the 10 years he was there, he wrote 30,000 of those letters! So that was his way of doing it. That was his way of drawing on his own strengths.
That’s it for today! If you enjoyed today's issue please do reply (it helps with deliverability). Want more curated Q&As like this? Visit Quda’s Tech or Science space.
See you next Wednesday — Justin