#24 Susan Cain: Leading the Quiet Revolution

For decades, introversion was looked at as something to overcome, almost like an illness. The way to win in life was through charisma, outspokenness, and self-promotion. Even now, in an increasingly noisy world, introverts may feel added pressure to take one of two paths: force themselves into more extroverted behavior, or become even more reserved and shrink back to themselves. My guest Susan Cain says both paths are wrong and in fact, rob the world of the unique contributions introverts make when they choose to be true to themselves. Susan knows what she’s talking about. A self-proclaimed introvert, she wrote the New York Times bestselling book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking and delivered one of the most popular TED talks ever delivered, with nearly 18 million views to date. Whether you consider yourself an extrovert, an introvert, or an ambivert (those lucky bastards in the middle) you’ll find a ton of value in this interview. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parrish, the curator behind the Farnham Street blog, which is an online community focused on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. The Knowledge Project is a place where we look at interesting people and uncover the frameworks they use to make better decisions, live life, and make an impact. On this episode, I have the remarkable Susan Cain. You're gonna love this. While we had never spoken before this call, Susan's work has influenced how I live, designed my space, and interact with others. As you'll discover, she's simply phenomenal. We talk about living a meaningful life, the relationship between introverts and extroverts, jealousy, how office environments affect people,

• 0:52Shane Parrish?

  how you can create some personal space, and so much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

• 1:09Shane Parrish?

  Can you tell me a little bit about how you spend your day? How do you choose to invest your time now?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Oh, that's such a funny question, or just a good question, because, you know, I find that if I'm not paying attention, not only the day will run away with me, but my whole lifetime.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  So I try to do things in blocks of time. And my best days are the ones where I spend them reading, writing, researching, and playing tennis. And I try to smush everything in when my kids are at school, which makes it kind of tough because there's so many different things that I want to be doing each day, but it's actually not all that many hours, you know, from like 8:30 to 3:30. Ends up being most of my work day.

• 1:59Shane Parrish?

  What are you reading these days?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I am reading right now a book by Robert Sapolsky. I don't know if you know him, but he's a neurobiologist and primatologist. So he studies the brain, but then he goes every summer, I think it is, to Africa to study baboons. And he kind of puts it all together and talks about human nature and the neurobiology of human nature. And I just love him because he's not only super smart, but he's very, very humane. So he's always approaching all these questions from a kind of openly vulnerable and searching place. And it makes for great reading. So he has a new book out called Behave.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  That's all about what makes human. It's kind of about the good and evil in human nature and what underlies it all.

• 2:53Shane Parrish?

  What's generally your process for reading a book? Like, do you pick it up and read it cover to cover? Or do you have any?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, for reading, for me, reading is too precious a thing to even apply the word process to it. So I don't even really think about it that way. I just read whatever I want to read at that moment. And if I love it, then I'll go cover to cover. And if I don't like it or would rather read something else, then I'll switch. You know, I don't really have a system.

• 3:22Shane Parrish?

  You just put it down?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  But I do notice that, yeah, yeah, I'll just put it down and switch to something else. But I definitely noticed that when I'm traveling on vacation, I'm much more apt to really get into a novel. Whereas when I'm at home, it's much more nonfiction. I think I just don't have the same kind of brain space in my daily life to kind of, you know, get into a fictional world in a sustained way. It's kind of a shame, but I've noticed that to be true.

• 3:54Shane Parrish?

  How do you go about filtering what you read? Like, there's so many books, there's, you know. Ten million, seemingly like ten million books come out a year. And what's your process for kind of deciding which ones you place time with?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I really don't have a process. I just kind of go for whatever strikes my fancy at that moment. So my husband always kind of teases me about the stack of books on the nightstand. Because it's like, it's very, very varied. And I just reach for whatever I feel like at that moment. So, I don't know, I guess the, just before I was picking up Robert Zepolski's book, I made my way through Elena Ferrante's four novels of the Neapolitan Quartet. I don't know if you follow Elena Ferrante at all. She's this amazing Italian writer. And her novels are just kind of incredible. So, as I said, I only do that when we're traveling.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  And we were just away on vacation in Portugal and Italy. So, I read all those books while I was there.

• 5:01Shane Parrish?

  Sounds awesome. Do you use them as inspiration for your own writing?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I use everything, all signs of creativity around me for me are inspirations for my own writing. So, you know, it's books, but it's also music or movies or anything. Like, I feel, I don't know where this motivation comes from, but I feel really driven to just express what it's like to be alive and to just tell the truth about it. Because I don't think people tell the truth about it most of the time. And I really worry about this with social media, that I feel like especially, you know, younger kids being raised on social media, don't even know what it's like to tell the full truth because everything is so curated.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  And even diaries nowadays, you know, are kind of like kept online for all to see. I really want to figure out like what's difficult about being alive.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I don't know, you know, I I think that's actually what makes us feel love of like understanding how difficult it can be sometimes and that everybody's every everyone's facing the same thing. So that's a roundabout answer to your question because any time I hear any kind of um music that expresses that or go to a play that's really great, all of that, I like I'll come out of it feeling doubly inspired to make my own contribution.

• 6:26Shane Parrish?

  How old are your kids?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  They are seven and nine.

• 6:30Shane Parrish?

  How do you talk to them about this, like the the social media and being themselves and um you know, having imperfections, if you will, or?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, well, you know, the social media stuff hasn't really happened for them yet. Um, I mean, we definitely struggle with not having them on their iPads too much, but it's more about games. It's not really about and and also I have um I have boys, so I feel like the kinds of social pressures that come up on social media and stuff like that, I I I imagine that happens later in their lives, but it's not really happening yet. Um, but in terms of just like the imperfections of of each person and the imperfections of life in general, I I have actually found that when they get upset about something that happened or feel like, yeah, you know, just feel like something made them sad or

• 7:24Speaker 01

  mad or whatever, I find that when I tell them, well, that's kind of how life is, you know, you're gonna have good days and bad days and you're gonna have joy and you're also gonna have times that you feel upset. Um, I find that that is the quickest thing to make them feel better.

• 7:40Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Because I think a lot of a lot of times when we get upset about something, we don't even realize it, but it's coming from a feeling that it's not supposed to be this way, like something went horribly wrong. Um, and so in addition to the thing itself, you're kind of feeling like it should be different, it should be better. Um, and I think understanding that, you know. Everything is just inherently mixed and, you know, there's, there's beauty and there's ugliness and there's vulnerability and there's strength and it's all kind of mushed up together in our lives. So not being surprised by each piece of it is incredibly liberating.

• 8:21Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that helps them build resilience?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really do. I really do. I just think it helps you take things in stride and, you know, okay, like I tell them, okay, so you're having one of those moments now. It doesn't feel good and, you know, take some deep breaths and know that the moment's gonna pass. It's natural that it's happening and it's gonna pass.

• 8:43Shane Parrish?

  You wrote one of the most cultish, successful books in probably the last 20 years. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about the book so that we can start from the same place?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sure. So I wrote this book. It's called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. And I guess the title says a lot, but it's about the, the powers that introverts have despite the fact that we live in a world that would tell you that the only path to happiness, success, and contributions and so on is to be extrovert. I mean, I, I believe we live in a world that's kind of biased towards extroversion. And I, but I was kind of looking around me, you know, before I wrote this book, I was looking around me and seeing people in my family and people in my workplace and so

• 9:35Speaker 01

  on who were distinctly introverted and were, to me, obviously contributing and wonderful people because of their introversion and not in spite of it. And, and I, and I had been interested from pretty early in my adulthood in feminism. And so, and so I spent a lot of time thinking about gender identity. But I used to be a Wall Street lawyer before I became a writer. And, you know, and I would sit around in these negotiations at my law firm or just meetings and, and people would be talking so much about questions of, of, of gender, especially in terms of how people, in terms of how the people around them were behaving.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  And it struck me that that was really important, but was leaving a whole piece, missing, a whole explanatory piece of what was happening. You know, that, that, that so much could be explained by Personality in general and in particular by how inner directed or outer directed a person tends to be. And no one was talking about it and there was no language for speaking about that aspect of our identities. Even though I realized, like, once I started delving into personality psychologist, you know, I, I, I realized that most personality psychologists believe that introversion and extroversion are one of the most, if not the most fundamental aspect of human nature,

• 11:02Speaker 01

  you know, and, and that, that's true across all cultures. That this tendency to be introverted or extroverted explains so much about who we are. And, you know, and, and as I said, um, at the beginning, you know, I, I have this impulse to kind of tell the truth about what it's like to be alive. And, um, and, and this is something I had been thinking about and feeling for a long time, from, since the time I was a kid, I'd been thinking about being kind of a quieter person in a world that would expect you to be more outgoing. And it was something that caused me quite a bit of discomfort and at times pain.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And it felt embarrassing, um, to write about it at the beginning, but because I have this, this impulse, I guess I, I went ahead and did it anyway.

• 11:54Shane Parrish?

  This has been around for a long time. I mean, it seems like, you know, I think you even wrote about this in your book, that since the, the dawn of time, people have basically been talking about, um, introversions and extroversions. Why do you think it's getting, why do you think now is the right time to draw so much attention to it? What's changed about the world that this has become something that people gravitate towards?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Well, you know what? It's funny, people ask me that a lot and I... Actually believe that I could have written this book anytime during the last hundred years and it would have had the same reaction. And I say that because I think the big change happened about a hundred years ago.

• 12:37Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Or a little bit more at this point, which is um when when we moved from being what historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. So what happened is we used to be living in small towns um alongside people we had known all our lives, right? Um, and then suddenly, you know, there's this great confluence of urbanization and industrialization and the rise of corporate culture. And and people started moving into the cities and living with people they had never met before. Um, and suddenly needing to make a good impression at a job interview or and to be a salesperson on behalf of their companies. And so, you know, when they were still in the small towns, people really knew each

• 13:22Speaker 01

  other and they judged each other based on were they good people, were they contributing to the community? So questions of how outgoing you were just didn't matter that much. Um, but suddenly, when you have to make a a good impression uh in front of people you don't know, these questions of how magnetic you are and how charismatic you are and how winning, um, how likeable, how charming, all these things started mattering a lot. Um, so there's this one really fascinating um study that was done by this guy Warren Sussman and he he looked at the self-help books from the 19th century and compared them to the self-help books from the 20th century. And he found that literally like the words that the authors use were completely different.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  So in the 19th century, the words in the self-help books are all about character and virtue and integrity. And in the 20th century, the words were, you know, magnetism and charisma and likability. And, you know, I I think that's still the world we've inherited today.

• 14:24Shane Parrish?

  Do you live, I'm curious, do you live in a city or do you live in a quieter area?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Oh, well, it's funny you say that because I live in a quieter area, but not out of choice. I actually prefer the city. I lived in Manhattan for seventeen years before moving out to, I live in the Hudson River Valley now in New York, and I loved Manhattan. And I think for a creative person and for an introverted person, I think Manhattan is Nirvana because you have all this anonymity. So you're surrounded by all these creative people and you're picking up on everything that's going on around you. You know, you just pick it up unconsciously. But you also have the kind of freedom and anonymity to just flow your way around the city.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Whereas in a small town, you're kind of missing both of those elements. So I've grown to really love the quiet and to appreciate it. But it's not what you think, you know, I wouldn't, we moved out here because we were having kids and wanted more space and kind of the usual stuff. And I have grown to love it.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  But anytime I go back to the city, I feel my pulse quickening in a really good way.

• 15:42Shane Parrish?

  I'm curious about the, I think it's a spectrum, right, of introversion to extroversion and we all fall somewhere on that. How does that change? Does it change with where we are in life? Does it change with environment? What impacts that?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, both. I mean, so, you know, even in the course of a single day, you, I think most people find that in the company of one person, they're more introverted and the company of another, they're more extroverted. And sometimes it just depends on what activities they're doing. So there's a lot of fluctuation. And then over the course of a lifetime, you know, one thing that happens that I think confuses people, people will say to me a lot, you know, I now go around and give speeches all the time and do media and things like that. And they'll say, oh, so ironically you've become more of an extrovert. And I always say, no, I mean, totally not. It's it's more that I've over time

• 16:39Speaker 01

  gained the skills to be able to do these things. Um, and I wanna do them because I really care about what I'm saying. So I'm doing something that's vaguely uncomfortable in the service of something I care about. But but my underlying nature has not changed at all, you know? Um, and so I think we we often confuse skills with with our true nature. Um, and the real question to me is, how would you choose to spend your time?

• 17:07Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  If you truly had no social or professional obligations, what would you be doing? You know, and how many people would you choose to spend it with?

• 17:17Shane Parrish?

  Often feel like I'm an undercover introvert, um, you know, masquerading as an extrovert.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, you and half the population. I hear that all the time.

• 17:27Shane Parrish?

  What advice would you would you give people like that who who feel like they're um, trying to adapt and live in a world that may not be as compliant with them as they would like, or rewarding things that they might not value?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I find very liberating the work of Brian Little. Um, he's a personality psychologist who I got to know when I was doing my research. And he's become a really good friend, too. He he's such a good guy. He he basically gave me a two, uh, like my own personal PhD in personality psychology when I was researching this book.

• 18:03Shane Parrish?

  Oh, cool.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  He's such a nice guy. He took me under his wing and just taught me everything. Um, and I mentioned him for this question because Brian is a total introvert. And he's also a brilliant, brilliant psychologist and public speaker. He loves his students. He loves just teaching people what he knows. And so

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Um, he's kind of all the time masquerading in a way because he's always giving these speeches and, um, you know, and receiving standing ovations. And if you saw him on stage, you would think he was this gigantic extrovert. He's, he's totally passing. Um, but he says that the minute he comes offstage, he runs for the nearest restroom because he's like utterly depleted and doesn't want to do the small talk. Um, and out of this experience of his life, he, he created this whole branch of personality psychology that is all about your question. Um, it's called free trait theory. And the idea is that all of us have core personal projects,

• 19:11Speaker 01

  by which he means like, you know, the, the people we really love or the work we really care about doing. And he says, in the service of these core personal projects, we, we can and we should act out of character, you know, like basically step outside our comfort zones. But the key is that you're do, you're stepping out of character strategically. So when you're done achieving whatever goal it is, you come back into character and you put yourself in what he calls a restorative niche, where you get to be yourself. So, you know, for you, let's say if you were doing a, a day full of podcast interviews, I, I believe it would be important for you to also schedule downtime

• 19:52Speaker 01

  where you don't have to be on at all, you know, and you go take a long walk or whatever it is. And, and you honor that obligation to your, that the commitment to yourself just as strictly as you would the fact that, you know, you and I said to each other that we would meet at nine and we were both ready at nine, right?

• 20:10Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  You know, and you should be doing the same thing with the solitary walk that maybe you're going to take later today. And, um, and when you do it that way, the, the, the parts of the day where you're stepping out of character, they feel good because it feels like you're in control of them and you're doing it from a positive place as opposed to from a place of feeling like, you know, there's something wrong with the way I am, so I have to pretend to be somebody else. That's, that's a completely different mindset.

• 20:37Shane Parrish?

  How do you create space in your relationship? I think in your TED Talk, you mentioned you're married to an extrovert and you have kids and you have. How do you do that?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, well, I I will say I have a huge advantage in that my work affords me so much solitude, you know, because that's the nature of writing. Um, that's obviously not true on the days that I'm speaking and doing media and stuff like that. But I do have a lot of work time where I'm, you know, uh, uh, sitting in a cafe with my laptop. So that's a huge, huge help compared to many people I speak to who have jobs where they really have to be on all day. You know, and then they face the thing of like, okay, I was just on all day at work. And now I came home and my wife wants time and my children want time and there's no time for them. Um.

• 21:24Shane Parrish?

  You were doing that when you were on Wall Street, though, right?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I didn't have kids back then.

• 21:30Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Um, and I don't, you know, even on Wall Street, I don't know. I I worked at a law firm where we all had our own offices and um, the work I was doing was pretty cerebral. So even though there were a lot of days where I'd be in terms of meetings and conference calls, there was also quite a bit of time kind of sitting alone in my office, thinking through, you know, a hundred page documents. So that helped. But I don't know, I guess I would say, you know, like even on the days when it's sort of an all hands family day. You know, I'll I'll say to my husband, I'd like to go take a walk now and he gets it. And so it's just not a big deal, I would say. I also find that for me, and I think for a lot of introverts, um,

• 22:15Speaker 01

  the time that I spend with other people who I know really well, like family, is very relaxing compared to time spent with people I don't know well. Because there's not that feeling of like you have to be on.

• 22:28Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  You know, you're just being you. So it's it's way more relaxing.

• 22:31Shane Parrish?

  Was this like a conscious conversation you had with your husband where you're like, I need space and this is just how I work? Or was this just something that organically was kind of learned between you guys?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think it helped that I started writing this book pretty early into our relationship. So he really understood all this stuff in a visceral way because he was kind of, you know, with me as I was researching it and thinking about it. So we do sometimes have to have those kinds of conversations, but not as much as we would have to if if not for that.

• 23:08Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  But but even even then, like, it sometimes comes up between us in funny ways that neither of us are even at first aware of, like, we we often have a thing when we're driving where, you know, he'll turn up the the volume dial on the music really loud, and I'll turn it down, and then he'll turn it up and I'll turn it down, and we're like a couple in a sitcom. And it took us a while to realize that that was an introversion extroversion thing. And somehow, once you frame it as that, it's actually a lot easier to work it out. I think because it gives it it gives legitimacy to the other person's point of view, instead of feeling like, you know, why do they have this inexplicable desire? It's so different from my own.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  You you kind of know where they're coming from.

• 23:54Shane Parrish?

  How do you resolve that now?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Um, I guess we just kind of work it out. The the the volume is usually kind of in the middle. Um, except if there's a song that he really likes, then it goes up. Or sometimes I really like it and I want it up too. I don't know. We just figure it out. Take turns.

• 24:12Shane Parrish?

  You you mentioned office environments. Um, earlier when you were on Wall Street and you had an office and you were reading these hundred-page documents, and you can kind of close the door and create some personal space. It seems increasingly the world is moving towards, uh, for whatever reason, open offices. Maybe, can you tell me, how does an office, physical office environment, affect people?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, it is so huge. I can't even tell you. And I'll say, when I was interviewing for my law firm jobs, so this was all the way back in nineteen ninety-four, I guess, I I had like ten interviews at different law firms. And I I still remember this, I went around with a legal pad, like, taking notes on the different interviews. And the first thing that I wrote down in my notes was what kind of office space we would, we as the young associate lawyers would get. Um, and in some lawyers, you got your own, I'm sorry, in some law firms, you got your own office, and in others, you had to share an office. And I really wanted to work only at the ones where you got your own office.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  And you know, and it was still really nice. You had all, all the other lawyers, like the way these law firms were set up. It would be like a, a hallway and everybody had their own office and it felt like a college dorm in a way. Like all your friends were right down the hall and you could go visit each other, but you still had your own private space. Um, so you know, I, I, I really enjoyed that. And then when I started researching Quiet, I didn't even know about open office spaces at that point. I didn't know they existed. Um, this was back in two thousand and six, but I decided that Silicon Valley was likely to be a nirvana for introverts. So I flew to Silicon Valley and I just plopped myself down there, um, and started visiting people in their workplaces.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And that's when I first saw the phenomenon of open plan offices. And back then, it was not considered professionally acceptable to complain about your open plan office.

• 26:13Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Um, you, you would be seen as not a team player if you said you didn't like it. So what happened is, um, people were coming up to me and they were kind of whispering, you know, about how much they hated it. And they were saying to me, you know, can you, do you know of any research that I could give to my boss that would explain why this is so unproductive for me? And I had no idea, but I started looking into it and I realized that there was actually a mountain of research that already existed and you know, to that mountain now, uh, more mountains have, have grown up. Um, uh, all of it pointing to the, the problems of these office spaces, you know, that they make people less productive because you're, you're, you're so much more likely to be interrupted.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And with each interruption, it takes you twice as long to complete your task. Um, and, and people just psychologically feel kind of invaded because when you feel like you can be observed and overheard all day long, that's a huge emotional and cognitive load that literally makes you not think as clearly. Uh, so there's, there's all these problems. So ever since then, I've been a kind of, uh, A champion of of pulling back from these kinds of open spaces. And I I do think that there is now a popular backlash against them. And architects and and office planners are starting to be aware of that. But of course, there's a huge economic incentive to design offices this way.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  So I'm not quite sure what will happen.

• 27:44Shane Parrish?

  Do you do you think it was the economics that drove this in the first place? Or was it a world where in theory, I mean, hypothesizing here that extroverts are in charge and they prefer this? And then?

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Um, I think a little bit of both and a third thing. I I I do think the economics at the end of the day are a huge driver because you just save an enormous amount. You know, um, because there you so in an open space, there's the the square footage per employee is so much less than if you're giving people their own office space. Um, but I think what happened is that that also coincided with this this cultural era that I believe we're in that I call the new group think, um, where there's there really is this belief out there that creativity comes from a gregarious mode, you know, where where everybody's interacting together.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  So there's this word collaboration and and it happened probably about ten or twenty years ago that collaboration became a kind of sacred word in society and especially especially in business society. So and and and and the problem with that is that there's many different kinds of collaboration. And they look and feel very different, but they all got slashed together under this one word. So, you know, Lennon and McCartney sitting together in a quiet room is collaboration. And so is doing your work in the midst of a deafening open office plan. They're both the same word, but totally different experiences. Um, but but I do think what I I do think people came to honest to God, believe in

• 29:24Speaker 01

  the power of twenty four seven collaboration. And I also think they use that as a convenient way to dress up economic incentives.

• 29:33Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I think the economic incentives are particularly interesting in the sense of like, you have this very visible cost, which is like rent and you know, you see it where you have this invisible kind of thing that you don't see, which is kind of productivity, morale, motivation of people and how they get energy and how they apply that energy. And so you're you're you're kind of trading one part of what you see for something that you don't see.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:01Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly it. It's it's an intangible cost and it's really difficult to put a number on it. And so people don't.

• 30:09Shane Parrish?

  But that doesn't mean it's not real.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. It doesn't mean it's not real. Exactly, exactly. Um, you know, and I'll throw, just from my own personal experience, I'll throw another wrinkle into this, which is to say, I actually love working and writing in cafes and co-working spaces, despite everything I just told you. I really do, because I I do pick up on the energy of people around me and I find it very energ- very invigorating. But I believe it's different working in a cafe as an anonymous person versus working in an office, an open office space with all your colleagues and all the politics that are, you know, flowing all around you everywhere you look. Completely different experience.

• 30:55Shane Parrish?

  I mean, people probably, I mean, maybe you because you're so recognizable, but I mean, people in general don't walk up to people in cafes anymore and kind of interrupt them or start conversations.

• 31:07Shane Parrish?

  Whereas.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Right, right. And they don't have the power to pull you into a meeting.

• 31:10Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  At a moment's notice. It's just a completely different thing.

• 31:13Shane Parrish?

  Meetings are the worst. This is the best part about working for myself now is like I set my own meetings and you know.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And you can probably stagger them, right? So that, like, you can schedule them in a way that works for you.

• 31:25Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  What did what did you used to do before you were podcasting?

• 31:29Shane Parrish?

  Oh, I worked in an intelligence agency.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 31:33Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Do you mean the CIA or a different one?

• 31:36Shane Parrish?

  A three-letter agency that I'm not actually allowed to name by law, so.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Interesting. Okay. Um, I want to hear more about that offline.

• 31:45Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:48Shane Parrish?

  Do you think like that we structure environments? Should we be structuring them by work or by people?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, say more. What do you mean?

• 31:56Shane Parrish?

  Well, I mean, uh, uh, is there types of work that lend themselves to different environments? Like, if you were to design an office environment for a company with, say, a thousand employees, uh, and so you have a mix of introverts and extroverts, and you have a range of, of business functions from marketing to HR to, um, programming to maybe legal, and how would you go about, um, thinking about that? I mean, would, yeah, how would you think about that?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I see what you mean. Uh, it, it's a little bit of both. Um, so first of all, I think it's important to design workplaces now nowadays where people have a choice of how they'd like to work. So, um, a place where people can move freely back and forth between private spaces and open communal spaces, I, I think is the ideal. And at the same time, there also are definitely job functions where, regardless of what kind of personality you have, you just need more privacy than for others, you know? Um, so being a lawyer is a really good example because you're often doing very confidential stuff.

• 33:05Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Um, and, and also you're often having to really sit down and think deeply in a way that would be really distracting if you had too much going on around you. Which is something I've heard many journalists talk about too. Um, you know, journalists now having to kind of crank out pieces on deadlines and they're in a really busy, um, chaotic office often tell me about how much trouble they have with that. So I think it's a little bit of both, of job function and personality. And I, and I, I do, I do think like the best bet, just as a kind of rule of thumb, is offices that have enough flexibility that anybody can get what the space they need at a given time.

• 33:43Shane Parrish?

  Do you think there's a broader consequence to this, this trend maybe of working from home or distributed work? Um, or maybe not so much working from cafes where we're at risk of like, everything is so convenient these days, right? Like, I don't have to leave my house if I don't want to. Amazon can deliver everything, you know, groceries can come and meals can come and my interactions with people. Uh, even if my default is introversion, like my interactions with people just, they, they, you know, decline. Do you think there's a broader implication or consequence to that?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do, and I think that we all need to be really mindful of it, especially for those of us like you who have that option to work from home. You have to be really mindful of when you're approaching that level where you're gonna go stir crazy. Or if not stir crazy, your mood just might start to fall. Um, because I, I, I think you were kind of implying this in your question. It doesn't matter if you're an introvert, you still want to have social contact. And at a certain point, you start to crave it and you're not as happy when you're not having it. So you just have to be kind of more proactive about triggering, about triggering your environment throughout the day.

• 34:59Shane Parrish?

  I guess that's not really like an introversion, extroversion question. It's more of like, society is changing in a way where things come to us instead of us going to a mall and bumping into people and interacting with people. It just, you know, you can log on to your computer and you can order something and it shows up at your house and you never have to speak with anybody, you never have to really see anybody.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Right, and I think that for all of us, uh, that life that you just described in extremis is not happy making. And then the thing that's different for introverts and extroverts is that extroverts will get unhappy a lot more quickly than introverts will if they let that happen to them for extended periods of time. But, you know, what I always say to people, okay, so really the difference between introverts and extroverts at a neurobiological level is that we have different nervous systems and.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Introverts have nervous systems that react more to stimulation. So for us, the sweet spot is when there's less stimulation around us. That's when we tend to feel at our most energized and happy. And for extroverts, they have nervous systems that react less to stimulation. So that means they need more of it to get to their sweet spot. And so it's it's kind of this question of different sweet spots. But the thing that's really key, and once you become aware of this, you'll notice it all the time, that your own craving for and tolerance of stimulation varies throughout the day.

• 36:28Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  So sometimes you need more, sometimes you need less. And if you start paying attention to that and then honoring how you're actually feeling, you really can take the steps you need to get yourself into your sweet spot more of the time.

• 36:42Shane Parrish?

  Do you think there's like a biological clock? Like, is it every day that kind of works that way? Or is it it ebbs and flows throughout the day?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  I think it ebbs and flows throughout the day and also in response to things that are happening in your life. So, you know, if you're having more overwhelming things happening in your life, you're probably going to be craving more of the downtime and vice versa.

• 37:04Shane Parrish?

  I want to go back to to the open office plan for a second again. If I'm an introvert in an open office, what what advice would you give me other than like quitting?

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there's the time honored at this point, time honored uh, practice of wearing headphones, which not only block out the noise, but also act as a social signal that my head's down, I'm working, don't bother me right now. So that's a big one. And another one is scheduling the time you need to get your breaks. And so maybe it's taking a walk or maybe it's working out with your boss that you're gonna

• 37:44Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  work from home one day a week. But, you know, you you gotta figure out how to schedule in the breaks that you need.

• 37:50Shane Parrish?

  I used to do crazy things like schedule meetings with myself and then go to a meeting room to actually do work.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I know people talk about that all the time.

• 37:59Shane Parrish?

  It's insane.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Or they'll talk about, I know, yeah, or they'll say, you know, that they get to work really early in the morning or stay late at night because it's the only quiet time. It's, it's crazy.

• 38:08Shane Parrish?

  How, how would you recommend broaching that with your coworkers or your boss? Like broaching this conversation of, hey, I'm not at my most productive. Uh, I need different things. How would you?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Well, it kind of depends on what your relationship is. I mean, because if you have a, an open friendly team, I would actually recommend, you, you can go to my website, it's quietrev.com. Um, there's a personality test that's right up there. And you could have everybody in your team take the personality test. It takes like five minutes. It's really, you know, it's a fun thing to do. Um, and then you, you could have a meeting where you all sit and talk about what your personality types are and how it impacts the way you like to work.

• 38:54Shane Parrish?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Um, and one, one exercise that we sometimes do, um, when Quiet Revolution comes in and works with companies is an exercise called, I wish you knew. Um, you know, where each person is thinking about and sharing with their colleagues. What, what do I wish you knew about the way I like to work?

• 39:12Shane Parrish?

  Is that done anonymously or is it?

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Or just the way I like to be? No, well, you could do it anonymously, but, but we try to do it. I mean, i- if you have a group where people are open to each other, it doesn't need to be, like, you could sit and think anonymously, but then you could share it with a group. And, and what, basically what you're doing is you're creating a space where it becomes socially acceptable to have this conversation. So, um, it, you, you're, you're now in a space where it's okay to say, I wish you knew that when I sit here in this open space all day, I'm actually not getting as much work done as I could if I were in a quieter space. Um, and that becomes a way to open up the conversation to, um, you know, well, what are some tweaks that we could make so that you could get more quiet time?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Um, and then there's other things, by the way, that, that introverts need to hear. Like, I wish you knew that when you react in a very muted way to a success that our team just had, it feels to me like you don't care, which is a very common one. That's why I bring it up. So these exercises can be very powerful. But but really, the the underlying key to what I'm saying is creating the space where it's okay to talk about this stuff. And once I I I have found that once that dam has broken and people start to feel it's okay, they can't shut up about it. Because it's endlessly fascinating and endlessly impactful on people's daily lives. So they want to talk about it.

• 40:43Shane Parrish?

  And once you have that psychological safety to talk about something that like that, I I would imagine that carries over into other things. Instead of letting things fester, you're probably producing a more open environment where you can air your feelings and your thoughts and you feel safe in doing so.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the holy grail. I I think it's hard for people to accomplish in teams because I don't know, I I think groups can be so inherently tricky to navigate and full of politics and so on, but I do think that's the goal.

• 41:15Shane Parrish?

  How how do you think about a manager or as a team leader, whatever you want to call them, should think about hiring people? Is there, do you want a mix of introverts and extroverts?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Yes, that's what you want. You you most definitely want a mix. Um, and there's research talking about this and I think common sense would also say it because um, you know, you can imagine it, you have a team, let's say, of all introverts and it can just become kind of too quiet and um, you're kind of craving someone to inject some energy in or make, you know, help with getting decisions kind of activated. Um, you have a team of all extroverts and people aren't thinking things through enough and they're just saying, yeah, let's go for it. And and and and maybe nobody is sitting down and um, kind of really getting the work done or thinking through the the what if questions or, you know, the the

• 42:14Speaker 01

  subtle questions of what might go wrong along the way or the things you need to attend to. So you you really, really need both types of people. But also, just from a social point of view, there's all kinds of evidence in the social literature, psychology literature. That introverts and extroverts are attracted to each other as colleagues, as peers and so on. That, you know, there is this sense, I think we all know it, that especially for those of us who are on one side of the spectrum or the other, as opposed to more in the middle. I think that we know that we need the other type in our lives to complement us. So we welcome them and people are happier that way.

• 42:53Shane Parrish?

  I guess that goes with you, obviously marrying an extrovert. And do you think it's a balancing thing? Like it forces you just a little bit out of your default? Or do you think there's something else going on there?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  I think it's a little bit of both. And I will say, when it comes to marriages, according to the literature and also from what I see, about half of the marriages are with people of the same, two people of the same personality style. And then about half are these introvert extrovert pairings. Which makes sense because there's pros and cons to both ways of doing it. But for your question about the introvert extrovert pairings. Yeah, I think if you marry someone who's not of your type. Yeah, they're pulling you out into another space. And I think there's also a feeling that they're good at doing things that you are not.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  And I mean, on a pragmatic level, that's just helpful. But I think it also make, you also admire them for being able to do things that you can't do. And then I think you feel appreciated for bringing in the pieces that are unique to you. So it's not that one is thinking about all of that consciously, but I think that's all going on.

• 44:10Shane Parrish?

  There was a great part of your book where you mentioned that you should pay attention to what you envy. I think you said jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it's revealing of the truth.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:21Shane Parrish?

  What do you tend to envy and get jealous of?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good question because.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  It's more like what did I used to envy, I think. I, I mean, I, I think I came to that insight. I may have written about this in a book, I think I did. That um, I had this moment, you know, so I used to be a corporate lawyer and it really, really was not what I should have been doing. And I would notice that if I would get together with other, with friends in, in my field, with fellow lawyers, you know, they would talk about someone who had just gotten to argue a brief before the Supreme Court or um, you know, some, some other legal accolade or somebody was running for office or something. And they were filled with, with envy really, and I, and I would think, huh, I, I don't feel that at all.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  You know, I, like, I, I just feel happy for that person. I don't, I don't feel envious. And I, you know, at, at first I was sort of congratulating myself for being able to be so generously happy without feeling envy. And then I realized, you know, that, that's really not it. It's just that I don't want these things myself. Um, but there were other kinds of things that made me envious and, you know, back then it was people who were kind of doing what I'm now doing. Um, that I was really envious of. So I, I, it was from that I started to realize, wow, it's like, it's the, it's the things you envy that, that point you in the direction of what do you really want for yourself? Um, I, and, and this is a totally different question, but it's a corollary to it.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  When you find yourself obsessed with a person or with a thing, often the obsession is also coming from that same place. Um, you know, you, you, like, I think you become obsessed with a person when that person has things that, that you wish to have in your life and you don't have. So all, all of these kind of uglier emotions are often pointing us in a helpful direction if, if you listen to them.

• 46:22Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about that in the context of social media where you're seeing, you know, the, the best of everybody else all the time?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's a, yeah, that's a really good question and it's almost a different kind of envy because. I think there with social media, yeah, everybody's putting up such unrealistic pictures of themselves, of their lives. So you know how we were talking at the beginning about how life for everybody is this mix of joys and pains and beauty and ugliness and like that. But if you go on social media, you would never believe that. If you go on social media, you're only seeing the beauty, you're only seeing the joy, you're only seeing the strength, right? And so it makes you feel like the normal imperfections of your

• 47:11Speaker 01

  own life are so much worse. So I think, I don't know, I think the only antidote to that is to just remind yourself of that truth every time you find yourself getting sucked into that kind of social media envy. And also, not to go on social media that much. I really don't spend that much time on it. I don't know, I just find it to be kind of, it gives me the same feeling that I sometimes get from reading Vogue magazine. You know, it's like, it's, it's pretty to look at and mildly interesting and you come away feeling vaguely bad. I think social media is a lot like that.

• 47:55Shane Parrish?

  I want to

• 47:56Speaker 01

  I don't mean, by the way, like, sorry to interrupt, you know, like cruising your Twitter feed for interesting information is not in that category. But I'm talking more about the feeling you get when you're too deep into Facebook or something like that.

• 48:09Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I found the whole thing really weird. I had a Facebook account that I opened up to people at one point, maybe 10 years ago, and it was like, it is just a horrible experience. I mean, I had people contacting me that wanted to connect, you know, that had no time for me in high school. And then you'd be like, oh, fine, you can be, you know, you can connect and message me. And then, you know, like three messages later, it's like, so what do you do for a living? How much money do you make? What kind of car do you have? And it's like, oh, my God, this is terrible. Oh, yeah. So I like deleted Facebook. And then I was like, this is, yeah, this is crazy. Like, I don't know why people

• 48:50Shane Parrish?

  focus on this. I want to circle back. I'm conscious of time here. I know you have a hard stop. So I wanted to ask you, as somebody who thinks about living so much, what does it mean to live? I'm like, what does it mean to live a meaningful life?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. You know,

• 49:07Speaker 01

  I think Freud had it right on this question. I think it's love and I think it's work. That's what matters, love and work. And by work, I mean, I'm using the definition of work pretty broadly. I don't mean like, you know, showing up at your marketing job and writing a memo. I mean, like, what is the work of your life? You know, like, what's the contribution that you want to make? And the work that you really love to do? And that might be the work you're doing as a hobby on Sunday afternoons or what have you. But I think those are, at the end of the day, the two things that really matter. And I also, this is partly having to do with the next book that I'm writing. So I guess my mind is really in this place.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  But I think it's hugely important to be tuned in to the

• 49:58Speaker 01

  beauty of humanity and also the fragility of humanity. And to be tuned into your own beauty and fragility also. And then to be thinking about that for everybody who passes by you on the street. Like, everyone who passes by you has their own mix of those things and their own struggles. And it's only when you're aware of them that you can really feel loving towards other people.

• 50:23Shane Parrish?

  How do you tune into that?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  So I think getting into that state by thinking about what people's stories are. And there's this amazing video that everybody should go and download. It's by, or you don't have to download it, you can see it on YouTube, by the Cleveland Clinic. Where it's this video where they show random people walking through the hospital corridors of the Cleveland Clinic. And if you were in those corridors, you'd probably have passed those people by and you wouldn't really think twice about it. But in this video, there's a little subtitle under each person as they walk by, telling you what personal struggle they're going through. And like, you can't watch this video without crying.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  But what it also tells, aside from that momentary emotional experience, like, I sometimes try to think as I'm walking down the city street, like, what each person's subtitle is. And I don't know what it is, but just reminding myself of the fact that everybody has their subtitle opens you up in a completely different way.

• 51:24Shane Parrish?

  How do you explore yours? Like your own subtitle, do you consciously like sit down and think about it? And how do you walk through that? Or is it something that you just need awareness of? Help me understand that.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  The subtitles for my own life, do you mean?

• 51:39Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, your meaning, like it. It sounds like the commonality between all of this is like between work and love is meaning and how we derive meaning. And then part of how we derive meaning in life, if I'm if I'm kind of connecting a few dots here is by understanding that other people have stories going on about them. And then how do we explore our own stories?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, huh, okay.

• 52:09Shane Parrish?

  Or maybe I'm totally wrong.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, I I I think what you said is exactly right. Or I mean, right in terms of the way I see it. I guess I think that the the challenge usually is more, how do you become aware of other people's stories? Because you don't know what they are unless they're telling you the truth. And as we've been saying, there's so much that's set up in our culture designed to prevent people from really telling the full truth.

• 52:35Shane Parrish?

  But imagining the stories we tell ourselves, like the first story we tell ourselves is the most convenient and flattering to our ego. That might not be the actual story of our and if we don't, if we don't scratch the surface of that initial story, we kind of have this blind spots, we're telling ourselves this false narrative, which shapes who we are.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's true. And you can, I I it it's hard to get away from our own false narratives. I guess I I am a huge believer, and I always have done this from the time I was a kid, um, in writing a real diary. You know, and I guess I alluded to it at the beginning, but writing things down that you intend for, that you would be horrified if anybody else ever read, like you wouldn't want. You know, they're not intended for public consumption. You don't want it to be found in the attic after you die. It's really just for you. And that, not only is that useful in and of itself, but I think it also just gets you into a state of mind where you're telling yourself

• 53:37Speaker 01

  that it's okay to tell the full truth to yourself, you know, about everything you think and feel and fear and dislike and like that.

• 53:44Shane Parrish?

  I like that a lot. Susan, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much. I have to say, like, this is like the best podcast. I'm not commenting on my side of it. I'm commenting on you. Like, this is the best podcast interview I've ever done, or the best interview in general.

• 54:04Shane Parrish?

  That's incredibly generous of you. Thank you.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  No, you are so incredibly thoughtful. It's wonderful to talk to you.

• 54:11Shane Parrish?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 54:17Shane Parrish?

  Hey, guys. This is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G dot com slash podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.

• 55:03Shane Parrish?

  This episode is brought to you by InkTel. Every business needs great customer service in order to stand out and gain a competitive advantage. Yet, many businesses struggle with how to provide their customers with world-class customer service. InkTel Contact Center Solutions is a turnkey solution for all of your customer care needs. InkTel trains their customer service reps to know your business almost as well as you do and help you build your brand. Managing a call center can be a complicated, expensive, and time-consuming task, and you still might not be able to do it well. So do what many leading companies do and outsource your customer service needs to a partner who specializes in taking care of your contact center needs.

• 55:43Shane Parrish?

  InkTel can provide your company with every touch point, including telephone, email, chat, and social media. As a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 off if you go to inktel.com/shane. That's I-N-K-T-E-L dot com.