The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class

Susan Cain on “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”

Episode Summary

Ever notice that extroverts get more shine than introverts? In her book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking," Susan Cain gives introverts center stage by showing how much they lose each time we undervalue them. Through research and interviews with extraordinary people, "Quiet" changes the narrative around introverts and, more importantly, transforms how they see themselves. In this episode of the podcast "The Next Chapter" by American Express Business Class, Cain and host Cardiff Garcia discuss how introverts thrive in the workplace and excel in surprising ways.

Episode Notes

Ever notice that extroverts get more shine than introverts? In her book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking," Susan Cain gives introverts center stage by showing how much they lose each time we undervalue them. Through research and interviews with extraordinary people, "Quiet" changes the narrative around introverts and, more importantly, transforms how they see themselves. In this episode of the podcast "The Next Chapter" by American Express Business Class, Cain and host Cardiff Garcia discuss how introverts thrive in the workplace and excel in surprising ways.

Episode Transcription

Cardiff Garcia: A lot of us throw around the words "introvert" and "extrovert" pretty casually. So an introvert might be your friend who just never wants to go out for drinks, and an extrovert might be your colleague who really knows how to give a great speech and is generally the life of the party. But societally, in everything from dating, to parenting, to leading teams, to entrepreneurship, we’ve long placed a much higher value on the traits of extroversion. And maybe that’s a mistake. Today I'm speaking with someone who has spent her life exploring the unseen, underappreciated virtues of introverts.

Hi, I'm Cardiff Garcia, and welcome to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. In each episode of this podcast, we introduce you to a bestselling book that everyone in the business world can learn from. And we're also gonna hear how the author's advice has evolved since they published their work, and what they would write for their next chapter. 

Today, we're speaking with Susan Cain.

Susan has known for most of her life that she does not fit into what she calls the extrovert ideal. This is the idea that society favors gregarious, strong-willed, really imposing extroverts. 

And for years, as a lawyer, Susan was surrounded by extroverts. And over time, she noticed that introverts like her actually had certain advantages, especially in those extrovert heavy environments. Susan began researching and writing about personality types. And the result was her bestselling book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking".

I sat down with Susan to discuss how introverts not only can survive in business, but excel in unexpected ways.

ACT I

Cardiff Garcia: Susan Cain, welcome to The Next Chapter.

Susan Cain: Thank you so much for having me.

Cardiff Garcia: Here's where I wanna start. When did you first convince yourself that it really was okay that you were introverted In a world, and especially in a labor market, that so often prizes extroversion.

Susan Cain: I've Thought about this topic since I was four years old, but never had a vocabulary for it until I was well into my twenties. So I grew up in a quite introverted family and very aware of the ways in which my preference of how I wanted to spend my time, and the way my parents and siblings and grandfather wanted to spend their time, like that they were, that they were different from the world around.

Cardiff Garcia: When you say that your family and you did things differently, do you mean like they were big time book readers, introverts themselves?

Susan Cain: Yes, I come from a family of huge bibliophiles to the point that we used to go to London many summers with a empty suitcase, which we would then fill with the books that we could get from the bookshops in London, you know, this was in the pre-Amazon days. And My father was a doctor and my grandfather was a rabbi, and they were both really extraordinary at what they did. And it was very clear to me growing up that part of what made them so great at their chosen work was that they were willing to go really deep and they were willing to spend time in solitude and in study to get to where they needed to be.

Cardiff Garcia: You mentioned earlier that when you were growing up, you didn't really have a vocabulary for talking about these personality types. And I’m wondering, when did you actually develop that vocabulary?

Susan Cain: You know, I became a corporate lawyer for about seven years before I became a writer. The whole time I was a corporate lawyer I was always thinking about these questions. But then at some point along the way, I stumbled across this book called Do What You Are, which had you take the Meyers-Briggs Personality Test, which I'm sure many of your listeners know, one of the main components of that test is introversion, extroversion. Um, and so this book had you take the test, figure out what your personality style was, and then help you figure out from there what was the right type of career for you. That book was incredibly revolutionary for me. 

Cardiff Garcia: You write about this one time during your career as a lawyer, when you ended up as the lead negotiator on behalf of one of your legal clients. And during the negotiation your opponents were taking, like, the stereotypical "extroverted approach", they were really loud, they were aggressive. And then you countered that bombastic style with your own quiet but still firm, kind, polite style.

Can you just talk a little more about that experience and maybe give us some insight into what that introverted negotiating style looks like?

Susan Cain: Yeah, so when I first started out as a corporate lawyer, I assumed that I was gonna be at some kind of a kind of personality disadvantage because I figured an effective lawyer was the type of person who would kind of sweep charismatically into the room and, be very dominant and, kind of the proverbial fist pounding on the table kind of thing.

and just because I had no choice, I ended up falling back on what came most naturally to me, which was to just kind of quietly and deliberately work through the points on the table and ask the other side what they were looking for and, you know, and try to stay firm to our principles, but understand how we could get a deal done, within a kind of more polite framework. You know, and I also, I would stay up late the night before and figure out what the different issues were gonna be so that I would be able to come prepared and know what I was talking about. So these are all very introvert like ways of doing things. 

There's a kind of secret to negotiation, but also to life, which is that if you, are speaking with the courage of your convictions, it doesn't matter how softly or how loudly you're speaking, because what people really pick up on is the frequency of your conviction. So, if you are in a place where you're pretty firm about what your principles are, gives you a lot more leeway to explore politely what the options are that will make everybody happy. You know, if people can sense that they can't push you over just because you're being polite. We tend in our culture to assume that kindness and politeness equals weakness in some way, and there's a way to signal that that's not so.

Cardiff Garcia: That's beautifully said. You went in with strong core convictions about your position, about your side, and simultaneously you didn't let the more kind of aggressively emotional approach of the other team change who you were. 

Susan Cain: I don't think I had a choice almost because I couldn't have acted in the, you know, to, to use that word, bombastic. I, I 

Cardiff Garcia: yelling at them and stuff. Yeah. 

Susan Cain: I just don't have that in my toolkit. It's just not in me. And that's okay. It turns out you can be effective with almost any style. It's just a question of drawing on the strength that you have.

Cardiff Garcia: Sounds like all that preparation also paid off because it allowed you to turn down the temperature when there was, you know, a strong disagreement on something or when you started very far apart in terms of what each side wanted, because you were well prepared it allowed you to offer alternative solutions. And at that point, you're then dealing in facts and possibilities rather than in emotions. Is that also more or less what happened? 

Susan Cain: That was a huge part of it. It's something that introverts really excel at because by our nature, introverts want to think about things pretty deeply before articulating them out loud. It's just like a way of processing, and that lends itself really well to doing deep prep before any kind of situation.

 You know, and it turns out in any negotiation class that you take, one of the first things that they'll tell you is to anchor the thing that you're advocating for in actual objective standards that are out there. You're not asking for a raise in your salary just because you wanna raise, you're asking for it because the market standard for your position is actually higher than what you're being paid now.

And then if you can point to that market standard and you've done the research to back you up, that's a hundred times more effective and it takes the temperature down and everybody walks away feeling better about it cuz it's no longer a contest of wills. It's just a sharing of information, which is just a completely different way of interacting.

ACT II

Cardiff Garcia: I wanna now go deeper into the contents of what's in the book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. There are a lot of competing definitions of introversion and introverts that psychologists use, but there are some qualities that they agree on. So why don't we start there? Take us through the qualities of introverts that psychologists do agree are present. 

Susan Cain: The definition that I like best and that many psychologists would agree on is that introverts tend to want to spend time in environments where you have less stimulation coming at you. I don't mean it less intellectual stimulation, but just fewer inputs coming at you. And the reason for this is that we are wired differently with different kinds of nervous systems. So extroverts have nervous systems where they feel at their most alive and at their most switched on when they actually have a lot of inputs coming to them, that's when their nervous system is in equilibrium. 

For an introvert, we have nervous systems that react more to incoming stimulation, whether it's social life or lights or noise or whatever it is. And so for us, our state of equilibrium is when our environments are a little bit more quiet and mellow. And this is why you have the kind of, stereotype of introverts as not liking parties and that kind of thing. And the reason for that, really, we think of that as being, oh, well that's about social life, but it's actually more about how stimulating a form of socializing do you want. So, Extroverts crave stimulation, so they'd rather get their socializing in an environment where there's lots of new people to meet and lots of people around.

And an an introvert's nervous system wants to tone down. So they would rather have a glass of wine with a close friend where it's one person that you're focusing on, and maybe the environment is a little more quiet and mellow. But I think understanding how physical these differences really are can help us give each other a lot more leeway and respect and, and for ourselves as well.

Cardiff Garcia: What are the things that introverts tend to be good at and the things that they tend to be maybe not so good at, or at least not as good at as extroverts?

Susan Cain: So I don't even really think of it so much in those terms because I think of it more in terms of what is the role that you have, and what is the role that you want to have, and then how do you draw on your own strength to do that role well. And that role can be anything. It could be anything from activities that we would think of as being traditional to introverts, such as writing or deep analysis but you also find them in the fields where you wouldn't expect it so much, whether that's leadership or sales or, or that kind of thing.

And so I, I kind of take a step back and say, well, what do you really wanna be doing with your time? What is the goal that you really have? And once you know that you can figure out how to use your style most effectively. And if you look at something like leadership, for example, it's really interesting what the data shows and what the anecdotes on the ground show. Because what we see from the studies is that introverts tend to be looked over for leadership positions or not cultivated for them in the first place, but then those introverts who do make it to leadership positions end up delivering results that are as effective as, or in some cases more effective, than extroverts.

So I, I'd like to see us get out of that kind of a paradigm.

Cardiff Garcia: And in terms of finding the right match for introverts versus extroverts, is it something like, well, if the job requires, a lot of solitude or benefits from a lot of solitude, then maybe it's a better match for an introvert, versus if the job requires a lot of glad handling or sales pitches, in-person interactions, then maybe it's a better job for an extrovert. Is it along those lines that we should be thinking?

Susan Cain: We should definitely all of us be thinking when we're evaluating any new job, any career, any career direction, am I gonna wake up in the morning looking forward to the kind of work that I have to do that day? And I don't think we ask ourselves that question enough.

At the same time, there is another question we all need to ask ourselves I wrote about in the book, and this comes from the research of the personality psychologist Brian Little. And that is to figure out what in this world are our core personal projects? That's the term he uses. And our core personal projects are the work and the causes and the loves in our lives that we are most devoted to. And what happens is, in the service of a core personal project, something that really matters, you will, and you should sometimes step out of character to get the job done. It's okay to sometimes do that. You just have to do it really mindfully so that you can then when you're finished, step into what Brian Little calls restorative niches. 

And maybe that means that you take a half an hour in between each meeting, even if somebody else might be dashing from one to the other. Whatever it's gonna be for you to approach these roles with a deep understanding and acceptance of who you are and making the roles work for you rather than the other way around is really the way to go.

Cardiff Garcia: There's an informal quiz in the book to show whether or not you tend to be introverted or extroverted. And I took the quiz and the quiz essentially gives you 20 statements and you just respond true or false to each of those. So some of the statements, for example, are I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities, or if I had to choose, I'd prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with many things scheduled.

So I took the quiz and I actually got 14 outta 20 on it, which means that I do tend to be introverted, and yet my job is to host podcasts. I love, love, love public speaking. And one of the points in your book is that those two things, Are not mutually exclusive. These activities that seem to be coded extrovert can be done really well and enjoyed by introverts.

Susan Cain: Yeah, that's true. And not only that, I would even go a step farther as to say that ever since I published this book and have found myself kind of out in the world of public speaking and podcasting and all this kind of stuff, I've found that most of the people I meet who are the ones asking the questions or the ones giving the talks or whatever, tend to be introverts, which at first surprised me.

But it's not so surprising when you really think about it, cuz these are still roles where you tend to be kind of diving deep into a particular thing. And a lot of introverts love to do that. And there is this misconception that if you're an introvert, you can't speak well, you can't socialize well, and that's really just not true. I, I've always made friends easily. I really love my friends, but, I've always liked to socialize in a very particular way.

Cardiff Garcia: One on one.

Susan Cain: Yeah. One-on-one or small groups that I know really well or that kind of thing.

Cardiff Garcia: And does that apply professionally as well in terms of scheduling the things you have to do or working with other people, meetings and so forth?

Susan Cain: Yes, and it's complicated because it's hard to know how much of that is only introversion/ extroversion, and how much of it is a kind of creative preference. Because I really love the kind of creative work where you can just put your head down, get into flow, go into your zone. And if I know I have a day of meetings, or even one meeting is enough to jog you out of that state cuz you know you have to get ready for the meeting, I don't enjoy that as much. And I, and I actually think that that is one of those areas where our whole work life because it's structured for extroverted norms it's also structured in a way that's not conducive to deep flow states for anybody, because anyone doing deep creative work needs to get into that sort of uninterrupted zone. 

Cardiff Garcia: That's such a great point and in particular something that I think introverts find frustrating, I'm guessing as an introvert who used to, you know, work in an office, is that you really don't have a lot of great options, especially in an open plan office where you're surrounded by a lot of people all the time for how to tune out interruptions. It seems like the modern workplace really is tailored towards extroverts in that sense because getting outside of all those constant stimulations is really hard. And in some offices that I've worked in at least, impossible.

Susan Cain: Humans in general do not do as well at tasks when they're interrupted and they don't do as well when they know they can be interrupted. Because that in and of itself is a cognitive load because you're never gonna allow yourself to get into that really deep state when you know that at any moment it can end.

This is why in so many open plan offices, there's this norm that's developed of people wearing headphones as a kind of valent signal to people, don't interrupt me now, I'm actually really focused. 

Cardiff Garcia: Yeah, similarly, while we're talking about these kind of loud, bustling, and collaborative workspaces, something fascinating that I learned from your book is that brainstorming seems only to be really good for bringing a team together, and of course that’s fine, that’s great, that’s useful—but brainstorming is NOT good for coming up with new, original, interesting ideas. Which of course is the very point of brainstorming.

Susan Cain: Yes. This is one of these weird things that brainstorming has become a kind of fixture of, I was gonna say modern day corporate life, but it really dates all the way back to something like the 1940s or 1950s, even though study after study after study, and there have been so many of them, has shown that it just doesn't really work for all kinds of different reasons. What works better is more of a hybrid approach where you have people spending time thinking about a problem alone, where they can really focus on it deeply and then coming together to talk about it, and maybe even toggling back and forth between those two states of mind. But you just can't think completely effectively when you're only in a group. There's just too many group dynamics that go on that interfere with anybody's ability to really think well.

Cardiff Garcia: Yeah, of course. And it, it makes a certain amount of sense when you stop to think about it because thinking in solitude allows for a little more time for reflection. It allows maybe for some creativity because your mind might be a little relaxed, and also you're not afraid of looking dumb in a group.

So it's a sort of, in a sense, a useful fraudulent exercise for bringing a team together, right?

Susan Cain: Yeah, and it's funny, it's so good at social cohesion that when you do these studies, what you find is that if you compare people who have solved a problem by brainstorming in a group versus by solving it alone, the, the individual solvers generally produce better answers. But the people who are in the group tend to think they produce the best answers because there's something about that social cohesion,  and we've all been there, right? You're in a group and somebody says X, and everyone else is like, oh, that's a great idea. And then you're all just sitting there telling each other what a great idea it is. You walk out feeling pretty good about the whole thing, and it could be terrible, and you have no idea, and there's no way of knowing.

Cardiff Garcia: And a lot of the time, it's probably the extroverts who are actually influencing those conversations, just because they’re the loudest voices. So, with that in mind, how could an introvert essentially adjust so that they can have the same chance at advancement, at great projects, and raises, and so forth as extroverts have?

Susan Cain: I mean, you need to find ways in your own style of making sure that your contributions are recognized. And that you are, even if it's not the most comfortable thing in the world for you, that you are sharing your ideas. for example, I always tell people when you're going into any kind of meeting, could be in person, it could be a zoom type thing, to think in advance of what points you might wanna make, what questions you might wanna raise, and to give yourself a push to express those ideas early on. Because the ideas that get expressed early and the people who express them become kind of anchors of the conversation. 

So the question is not like, how do I turn myself inside out into someone I'm not, the question is, how do I show up for myself in my own style? 

Cardiff Garcia: I was intrigued by the idea in the book that introverts tend to be better at assessing risk, and that introverts, for example, tend to be better at accounting for the downside possibility of taking a big risk. Whereas extroverts will tend to sort of keep going, like they'll keep taking big risks and sometimes won't be as attuned to the possible fallout.

And what struck me about that idea was that maybe there's a kind of ideal mix of introverts and extroverts in the workplace that it's good to have both. 

But what do you think?

Susan Cain: I think you just said it perfectly. I, I'm a huge, huge zealot for making sure that we have both types, you know, not only in a company in general, but within a team, or that if you personally know that you really tend towards one side or the other, you should make sure that you've got some kind of partner or colleague who can counteract you.

When it comes to this risk taking question, it's really interesting. Some of it has to do with neurobiological differences between introverts and extroverts, and what we know is that extroverts dopamine pathways tend to be more easily activated than those of introverts. And what that means in plain English is that if an extrovert sees the prospect of something good happening, you know, whether it's closing a deal or getting a promotion or whatever it is, they're gonna be really, really oriented on that positive outcome to the degree that they may be less inclined to see possible downsides and possible risks.

And introverts, conversely, it's not that they don't see the rewards, not that they don't get excited about it, but they're gonna have relatively more room to take in inputs about the subtleties of a situation or possible downsides and so on.

So, yeah, to, to come back to your question, once you know that about these orientations, it's like, of course you need both types.

Cardiff Garcia: You're listening to The Next Chapter, by American Express Business Class. When we come back, I'll ask Susan about what she would write for her next chapter, and how introverts are faring in a new world of remote work.

ACT III

Cardiff Garcia: Susan, I want to now turn to maybe the most important part of this interview. The next chapter. It's what we even call the podcast. So, Quiet, your book came out about a decade ago. Given all that's happened in the time since, if you could add one more chapter to the book, what would that chapter be about? 

Susan Cain: I've actually never found myself so much wanting to add another chapter to the book. What I have found myself really wanting to do is to bring people together who share this particular orientation towards life, because what I have found through the thousands and thousands of letters and emails and comments and everything that I get is there's this curious strength that comes once you understand that there are lots of other people out there who are like you, and that many of these people have contributed to the world in ways great and small because of who they are and not in spite of who they are. 

Cardiff Garcia: You also in the time since have published a second book, which came out in 2022, that book is called Bittersweet, it deals with sorrow and with longing and grief. 

Can you just tell us a little bit more about it?

Susan Cain: So bittersweet is about the ways in which we live in a world in which joy and sorrow and love and loss that they're forever paired. They're always going to go together. And we live in a culture that tells us not to say so, right? We live in a culture that tells us only to speak of joy and only to speak of love, instead of to speak of these as kind of twins that go together. And that what comes from that awareness and the acceptance of impermanence is a bridge to creativity and connection and even love.

Cardiff Garcia: A big trend, especially over the last few years has of course been the rise of remote work, or at least these kind of hybrid ways of working, where like some days you might go to the office and then other days of the week you can choose to work from home or from a coffee shop or anywhere else. That you might prefer to the office.

And this trend reminded me of a big theme in your book, which is that just how much the labor market values the traits of introverts versus extroverts really does fluctuate over time. And I think a lot of us would think of introverts as people who might prefer to work from home or somewhere a little bit less social.

And then vice versa. For the extroverts who we think of. As people who might prefer to go to the office or somewhere that is more social.  I'm curious to know, do you see it that way? Is it more complicated than that? And just more generally, how do you see this change in working conditions playing out?

Susan Cain: Well, I do think hybrid at least has the promise if done correctly, of making everyone at least somewhat happy. But I guess I would also caution against assuming that it's, you know, all extroverts wanna be in the office all the time, and all introverts wanna be remote all the time. Because I noticed, at the beginning of Covid, I had a number of, extroverted friends and colleagues who'd tell me, you know what I realized that even for me, they would say, even for me, the, the kind of life I had before was too much, and I'm really relishing being able to pull back from some of that. You know, and then you'd have introverts who were finding that they were very lonely. So for many people, neither extreme is going to be ideal, and I think the way forward is gonna be muddling our way towards some sort of hybrid solution, and I don't think we've figured it out yet.

Cardiff Garcia: I am optimistic about the model, though. The idea that now we have experimentation, we have maybe a chance at matching people who are introverted or extroverted to options to jobs where the setting actually suits them better, right? Like at least there's a lot of playing around with it, and that strikes me as only a good thing. It may not happen right away, which is why we're referring to it as a muddle, but at least now introverts got a shot, you know?

Susan Cain: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you can shop around now and not just for a career, but for a job that suits the amount of remote versus in person that you personally are looking for. And you know, and if you start paying attention to yourself, you'll probably notice that your appetite for these things and craving for these different types of work situations is gonna fluctuate not only with your personality style, but also your stage of life.

And the fact that we can increasingly tailor our work to that temperament and that life stage is, is a boon for everyone.

Cardiff Garcia: And on that note of tailoring our work to our personality and our life stage, there's a great line that actually comes towards the end of the book. You write, “jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth”. And what's great about that line is that you're talking there about finding what it is that you want to do in life and how it applied to your own journey away from law towards becoming an author. Can you tell us more about that and how you found what you wanted to do next?

Susan Cain: Yeah. So, I had wanted to be a writer since I was four, but I had done at first the traditional thing of going to law school to do the practical thing and be able to support myself. And while I was a lawyer, I found that whenever I would hear about former classmates or other people I knew who were clerking for Supreme Court Justice or arguing a case before Supreme Court Justice or whatever they were doing, I, I never felt the slightest flicker of envy for them.

And at first I was like, wow, I'm just very magnanimous and I, I don't feel envy. And then I realized that when I heard about this one woman in particular, someone I heard about who had gone to law school and left and then was publishing her first novel. I was so full of envy for that, and I realized that envy is just the great signpost that we should all be paying attention to, because it really tells you the truth about what you deeply want.

Cardiff Garcia: Not the kind of bitter envy that leads you to like hate somebody or to be constantly full of like your own kind of terrible jealousy, but the kind that says, Hey, I like that that person has figured this out and I'd love to be doing something similar and to figure it out myself. 

Susan Cain: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm not talking about like, oh, I wanna take that person down cuz they have, they have something I don't have. But just to say what they have is something I'd like to have too, I wonder if I could get there.

Cardiff Garcia: Well, we've spent most of the chat discussing the kind of underappreciated virtues of introversion and the ways in which introverts can kind of interact with extroverts to make sure that their contributions are appreciated and understood. So let me close with a different kind of question. What's your favorite thing about extroverts?

Susan Cain: Oh gosh, that's so easy. 

Cardiff Garcia: Okay. 

Susan Cain: like I really love extroverts and I always say this like, Introverts and extroverts are kind of made for each other as friends, as colleagues, very often as life partners. My, my husband is an extrovert. And I think this is because we're just naturally attracted to people who have qualities that we don't and vice versa.

So like with, in my husband's case, I love it that he never runs out of anything to say he just doesn't we, he's from Michigan and we'll often drive back and forth to Michigan to see his parents and it's like 11 hours he doesn't run out of anything to say. So it's just lots of fun and you know, and I think he appreciates that I'm more grounded and there's just this sense of us really being complimentary with an e towards each Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cardiff Garcia: And I think that's also a great place to close the chat. Susan Kain, author of Quiet, the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Just a great book. Thanks so much for this chat.

Susan Cain: Thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk to you.

Cardiff Garcia: You’ve been listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. A special thanks to Susan Cain for coming on the show today. And please tune in for our next episode where I’ll be speaking with Julie Zhuo about her book "Making a Manager" on what happens when you unexpectedly find yourself needing to manage people.

Until then, be sure to follow or subscribe, on whatever app you may be using right now. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review. Thanks for listening.