453 Quotes by Susan Cain

When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you. You risk your physical health. ‘Emotional labor,’ which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like and increase in cardiovascular disease.

Proust called these moments of unity between writer and reader “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Why shouldn’t quiet be strong?

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits – that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information – make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident – the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.

Any time people come together in a meeting, we’re not necessarily getting the best ideas; we’re just getting the ideas of the best talkers.

It makes sense, then, that Westerners value boldness and verbal skill, traits that promote individuality, while Asians prize quiet, humility, and sensitivity, which foster group cohesion. If you live in a collective, then things will go a lot more smoothly if you behave with restraint, even submission.

Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting? Must we learn to stage-manage our voices, gestures, and body language until we can tell – sell – any story we want? These seem venal aspirations, a marker of how far we’ve come – and not in a good way – since.

Even T. S. Eliot’s famous 1915 poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – in which he laments the need to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” – seems a cri de coeur about the new demands of self-presentation.

He also suffered from a certain amount of what he calls “reputational confusion,” in which he became known for being over-the-top effervescent, and the reputation fed on itself. This was the persona that others knew, so it was the persona he felt obliged to serve up.