Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking Part 20

But I believe that another important explanation for introverts who love their work may come from a very different line of research by the influential psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls "flow." Flow is an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity-whether long-distance swimming or songwriting, sumo wrestling or s.e.x. In a state of flow, you're neither bored nor anxious, and you don't question your own adequacy. Hours pa.s.s without your noticing.

The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. Although flow does not depend on being an introvert or an extrovert, many of the flow experiences that Csikszentmihalyi writes about are solitary pursuits that have nothing to do with reward-seeking: reading, tending an orchard, solo ocean cruising. Flow often occurs, he writes, in conditions in which people "become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself."

In a sense, Csikszentmihalyi transcends Aristotle; he is telling us that there are some activities that are not about approach or avoidance, but about something deeper: the fulfillment that comes from absorption in an activity outside yourself. "Psychological theories usually a.s.sume that we are motivated either by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear," Csikszentmihalyi writes, "or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige." But in flow, "a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working."

If you're an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts. You have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. You enjoy relative freedom from the temptations of superficial prizes like money and status. Indeed, your biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths. You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you undervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you. But when you're focused on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless.

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

Of course, that isn't always easy. While writing this chapter, I corresponded with Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric. He had just published a BusinessWeek online column called "Release Your Inner Extrovert," in which he called for introverts to act more extroverted on the job. I suggested that extroverts sometimes need to act more introverted, too, and shared with him some of the ideas you've just read about how Wall Street might have benefited from having more introverts at the helm. Welch was intrigued. But, he said, "the extroverts would argue that they never heard from the introverts."

Welch makes a fair point. Introverts need to trust their gut and share their ideas as powerfully as they can. This does not mean aping extroverts; ideas can be shared quietly, they can be communicated in writing, they can be packaged into highly produced lectures, they can be advanced by allies. The trick for introverts is to honor their own styles instead of allowing themselves to be swept up by prevailing norms. The story of the lead-up to the Great Recession of 2008 is peppered, alas, with careful types who took inappropriate risks, like the former chief executive of Citigroup, Chuck Prince, a former lawyer who made risky loans into a falling market because, he said, "as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance."

"People who are initially cautious become more aggressive," observes Boykin Curry of this phenomenon. "They say, 'Hey, the more aggressive people are getting promoted and I'm not, so I'm going to be more aggressive too.' "

But stories of financial crises often contain subplots about people who famously (and profitably) saw them coming-and such tales tend to feature just the kinds of people who embrace FUD, or who like to close the blinds to their offices, insulate themselves from ma.s.s opinion and peer pressure, and focus in solitude. One of the few investors who managed to flourish during the crash of 2008 was Seth Klarman, president of a hedge fund called the Baupost Group. Klarman is known for consistently outperforming the market while steadfastly avoiding risk, and for keeping a significant percentage of his a.s.sets in cash. In the two years since the crash of 2008, when most investors were fleeing hedge funds in droves, Klarman almost doubled Baupost's a.s.sets under management to $22 billion.

Klarman achieved this with an investment strategy based explicitly on FUD. "At Baupost, we are big fans of fear, and in investing, it is clearly better to be scared than sorry," he once wrote in a letter to investors. Klarman is a "world-cla.s.s worrier," observes the New York Times, in a 2007 article called "Manager Frets Over the Market, But Still Outdoes It." He owns a racehorse called "Read the Footnotes."

During the years leading up to the 2008 crash, Klarman "was one of the few people to stick to a cautious and seemingly paranoid message," says Boykin Curry. "When everyone else was celebrating, he was probably storing cans of tuna in his bas.e.m.e.nt, to prepare for the end of civilization. Then, when everyone else panicked, he started buying. It's not just a.n.a.lysis; it's his emotional makeup. The same wiring that helps Seth find opportunities that no one else sees can make him seem aloof or blunt. If you're the kind of person who frets every time the quarter is good, you may have trouble rising to the top of a corporate pyramid. Seth probably wouldn't have made it as a sales manager. But he is one of the great investors of our time."

Similarly, in his book on the run-up to the 2008 crash, The Big Short, Michael Lewis introduces three of the few people who were astute enough to forecast the coming disaster. One was a solitary hedge-fund manager named Michael Burry who describes himself as "happy in my own head" and who spent the years prior to the crash alone in his office in San Jose, California, combing through financial doc.u.ments and developing his own contrarian views of market risk. The others were a pair of socially awkward investors named Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai, whose entire investment strategy was based on FUD: they placed bets that had limited downside, but would pay off handsomely if dramatic but unexpected changes occurred in the market. It was not an investment strategy so much as a life philosophy-a belief that most situations were not as stable as they appeared to be.

This "suited the two men's personalities," writes Lewis. "They never had to be sure of anything. Both were predisposed to feel that people, and by extension markets, were too certain about inherently uncertain things." Even after being proven right with their 2006 and 2007 bets against the subprime mortgage market, and earning $100 million in the process, "they actually spent time wondering how people who had been so sensationally right (i.e., they themselves) could preserve the capacity for diffidence and doubt and uncertainty that had enabled them to be right."

Ledley and Mai understood the value of their const.i.tutional diffidence, but others were so spooked by it that they gave up the chance to invest money with the two-in effect, sacrificing millions of dollars to their prejudice against FUD. "What's amazing with Charlie Ledley," says Boykin Curry, who knows him well, "is that here you had a brilliant investor who was exceedingly conservative. If you were concerned about risk, there was no one better to go to. But he was terrible at raising capital because he seemed so tentative about everything. Potential clients would walk out of Charlie's office scared to give him money because they thought he lacked conviction. Meanwhile, they poured money into funds run by managers who exuded confidence and certainty. Of course, when the economy turned, the confident group lost half their clients' money, while Charlie and Jamie made a fortune. Anyone who used conventional social cues to evaluate money managers was led to exactly the wrong conclusion."

Another example, this one from the 2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, concerns a self-described introvert based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he's well known for shutting himself inside his office for hours at a time.

Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the wealthiest men in the world, has used exactly the attributes we've explored in this chapter-intellectual persistence, prudent thinking, and the ability to see and act on warning signs-to make billions of dollars for himself and the shareholders in his company, Berks.h.i.+re Hathaway. Buffett is known for thinking carefully when those around him lose their heads. "Success in investing doesn't correlate with IQ," he has said. "Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing."

Every summer since 1983, the boutique investment bank Allen & Co. has hosted a weeklong conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. This isn't just any conference. It's an extravaganza, with lavish parties, river-rafting trips, ice-skating, mountain biking, fly fis.h.i.+ng, horseback riding, and a fleet of babysitters to care for guests' children. The hosts service the media industry, and past guest lists have included newspaper moguls, Hollywood celebrities, and Silicon Valley stars, with marquee names such as Tom Hanks, Candice Bergen, Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs, Diane Sawyer, and Tom Brokaw.

In July 1999, according to Alice Schroeder's excellent biography of Buffett, The s...o...b..ll, he was one of those guests. He had attended year after year with his entire family in tow, arriving by Gulfstream jet and staying with the other VIP attendees in a select group of condos overlooking the golf course. Buffett loved his annual vacation at Sun Valley, regarding it as a great place for his family to gather and for him to catch up with old friends.

But this year the mood was different. It was the height of the technology boom, and there were new faces at the table-the heads of technology companies that had grown rich and powerful almost overnight, and the venture capitalists who had fed them cash. These people were riding high. When the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz showed up to shoot "the Media All-Star Team" for Vanity Fair, some of them lobbied to get in the photo. They were the future, they believed.

Buffett was decidedly not a part of this group. He was an old-school investor who didn't get caught up in speculative frenzy around companies with unclear earnings prospects. Some dismissed him as a relic of the past. But Buffett was still powerful enough to give the keynote address on the final day of the conference.

He thought long and hard about that speech and spent weeks preparing for it. After warming up the crowd with a charmingly self-deprecating story-Buffett used to dread public speaking until he took a Dale Carnegie course-he told the crowd, in painstaking, brilliantly a.n.a.lyzed detail, why the tech-fueled bull market wouldn't last. Buffett had studied the data, noted the danger signals, and then paused and reflected on what they meant. It was the first public forecast he had made in thirty years.

The audience wasn't thrilled, according to Schroeder. Buffett was raining on their parade. They gave him a standing ovation, but in private, many dismissed his ideas. "Good old Warren," they said. "Smart man, but this time he missed the boat."

Later that evening, the conference wrapped up with a glorious display of fireworks. As always, it had been a blazing success. But the most important aspect of the gathering-Warren Buffett alerting the crowd to the market's warning signs-wouldn't be revealed until the following year, when the dot-com bubble burst, just as he said it would.

Buffett takes pride not only in his track record, but also in following his own "inner scorecard." He divides the world into people who focus on their own instincts and those who follow the herd. "I feel like I'm on my back," says Buffett about his life as an investor, "and there's the Sistine Chapel, and I'm painting away. I like it when people say, 'Gee, that's a pretty good-looking painting.' But it's my painting, and when somebody says, 'Why don't you use more red instead of blue?' Good-bye. It's my painting. And I don't care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That's one of the great things about it."

Part Three

DO ALL CULTURES HAVE AN

EXTROVERT IDEAL?

CHAPTER 8

SOFT POWER

Asian-Americans and the Extrovert Ideal

In a gentle way, you can shake the world.

-MAHATMA GANDHI

It's a sunny spring day in 2006, and Mike Wei, a seventeen-year-old Chinese-born senior at Lynbrook High School near Cupertino, California, is telling me about his experiences as an Asian-American student. Mike is dressed in sporty all-American attire of khakis, windbreaker, and baseball cap, but his sweet, serious face and wispy mustache give him the aura of a budding philosopher, and he speaks so softly that I have to lean forward to hear him.

"At school," says Mike, "I'm a lot more interested in listening to what the teacher says and being the good student, rather than the cla.s.s clown or interacting with other kids in the cla.s.s. If being outgoing, shouting, or acting out in cla.s.s is gonna affect the education I receive, it's better if I go for education."

Mike relates this view matter-of-factly, but he seems to know how unusual it is by American standards. His att.i.tude comes from his parents, he explains. "If I have a choice between doing something for myself, like going out with my friends, or staying home and studying, I think of my parents. That gives me the strength to keep studying. My father tells me that his job is computer programming, and my job is to study."

Mike's mother taught the same lesson by example. A former math teacher who worked as a maid when the family immigrated to North America, she memorized English vocabulary words while was.h.i.+ng dishes. She is very quiet, says Mike, and very resolute. "It's really Chinese to pursue your own education like that. My mother has the kind of strength that not everyone can see."

By all indications, Mike has made his parents proud. His e-mail username is "A-student," and he's just won a coveted spot in Stanford University's freshman cla.s.s. He's the kind of thoughtful, dedicated student that any community would be proud to call its own. And yet, according to an article called "The New White Flight" that ran in the Wall Street Journal just six months previously, white families are leaving Cupertino in droves, precisely because of kids like Mike. They are fleeing the sky-high test scores and awe-inspiring study habits of many Asian-American students. The article said that white parents feared that their kids couldn't keep up academically. It quoted a student from a local high school: "If you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it."

But the article didn't explore what lay behind this stellar academic performance. I was curious whether the town's scholarly bent reflected a culture insulated from the worst excesses of the Extrovert Ideal-and if so, what that would feel like. I decided to visit and find out.

At first blush, Cupertino seems like the embodiment of the American Dream. Many first- and second-generation Asian immigrants live here and work at the local high-tech office parks. Apple Computer's headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop is in town. Google's Mountain View headquarters is just down the road. Meticulously maintained cars glide along the boulevards; the few pedestrians are crisply dressed in bright colors and cheerful whites. Unprepossessing ranch houses are pricey, but buyers think the cost is worth it to get their kids into the town's famed public school system, with its ranks of Ivy-bound kids. Of the 615 students in the graduating cla.s.s of 2010 at Cupertino's Monta Vista High School (77 percent of whom are Asian-American, according to the school's website, some of which is accessible in Chinese), 53 were National Merit Scholars.h.i.+p semifinalists. The average combined score of Monta Vista students who took the SAT in 2009 was 1916 out of 2400, 27 percent higher than the nationwide average.

Respected kids at Monta Vista High School are not necessarily athletic or vivacious, according to the students I meet here. Rather, they're studious and sometimes quiet. "Being smart is actually admired, even if you're weird," a Korean-American high school soph.o.m.ore named Chris tells me. Chris describes the experience of his friend, whose family left to spend two years in a Tennessee town where few Asian-Americans lived. The friend enjoyed it, but suffered culture shock. In Tennessee "there were insanely smart people, but they were always by themselves. Here, the really smart people usually have a lot of friends, because they can help people out with their work."