Susan Cain Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard's education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of power, but to use well the kind you've been granted.

Susan Cain
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
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
Introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation.

Susan Cain
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
The next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the power of quiet.

Susan Cain
There are only a few people out there who can completely overcome their fears, and they all live in Tibet.

Susan Cain
Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

Susan Cain
College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups.

Susan Cain
Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They're relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame.

Susan Cain
The emphasis is on community, on participating in more and more programs and events, on meeting more and more people. It's a constant tension for many introverts that they're not living that out. And in a religious world, there's more at stake when you feel that tension. It doesn't feel like 'I'm not doing as well as I'd like.' It feels like 'God isn't pleased with me.'

Susan Cain
So stay true to your own nature. If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don't let others make you feel as if you have to race. If you enjoy depth, don't force yourself to seek breadth. If you prefer single-tasking to multi-tasking, stick to your guns. Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way.

Susan Cain
I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country.

Susan Cain
This is the next great diversity issue of our time.

Susan Cain
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
For seven blissful years I had spent my time reading, writing and researching a book about introversion. But the publication date had arrived, the idyll was over and my metamorphosis was complete. I was now that impossibly oxymoronic creature: the Public Introvert.

Susan Cain
Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one's peers.

Susan Cain
We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.

Susan Cain
Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They're associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure.

Susan Cain
I'm seeing businesses embrace the Quiet Revolution as the next great diversity issue of our time.

Susan Cain
Our culture rightly admires risk-takers, but we need our heed-takers more than ever.

Susan Cain
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
We don't need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.

Susan Cain
The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, and insight — to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply.

Susan Cain
Most introverts aren't aware of how they are constantly spending their time in ways that they would prefer not to be. They've been doing it all their lives, so it just becomes second nature. I'm trying to give people entitlement inside their own minds to be who they are.

Susan Cain
Schwartz's research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.

Susan Cain
I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament, someone who could easily stand up to a busload of glowering passengers. But when she died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two, the flood of obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was "timid and shy" but had "the courage of a lion." They were full of phrases like "radical humility" and "quiet fortitude.

Susan Cain
We've known about the transcendent power of solitude for centuries; it's only recently that we've forgotten it.

Susan Cain
Women were also urged to work on a mysterious quality called 'fascination.' Coming of age in the 1920's was a competitive business...

Susan Cain
There's no correlation between expressing an idea assertively or charismatically, and having a good idea.

Susan Cain