Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking Part 23

But with his shyness came his unique brand of strength-a form of restraint best understood by examining little known corners of Gandhi's life story. As a young man he decided to travel to England to study law, against the wishes of the leaders of his Modhi Bania subcaste. Caste members were forbidden to eat meat, and the leaders believed that vegetarianism was impossible in England. But Gandhi had already vowed to his beloved mother to abstain from meat, so he saw no danger in the trip. He said as much to the Sheth, the headman of the community.

"Will you disregard the orders of the caste?" demanded the Sheth.

"I am really helpless," replied Gandhi. "I think the caste should not interfere in the matter."

Boom! He was excommunicated-a judgment that remained in force even when he returned from England several years later with the promise of success that attended a young, English-speaking lawyer. The community was divided over how to handle him. One camp embraced him; the other cast him out. This meant that Gandhi was not allowed even to eat or drink at the homes of fellow subcaste members, including his own sister and his mother- and father-in-law.

Another man, Gandhi knew, would protest for readmission. But he couldn't see the point. He knew that fighting would only generate retaliation. Instead he followed the Sheth's wishes and kept at a distance, even from his own family. His sister and in-laws were prepared to host him at their homes in secret, but he turned them down.

The result of this compliance? The subcaste not only stopped bothering him, but its members-including those who had excommunicated him-helped in his later political work, without expecting anything in return. They treated him with affection and generosity. "It is my conviction," Gandhi wrote later, "that all these good things are due to my non-resistance. Had I agitated for being admitted to the caste, had I attempted to divide it into more camps, had I provoked the castemen, they would surely have retaliated, and instead of steering clear of the storm, I should, on arrival from England, have found myself in a whirlpool of agitation."

This pattern-the decision to accept what another man would challenge-occurred again and again in Gandhi's life. As a young lawyer in South Africa, he applied for admission to the local bar. The Law Society didn't want Indian members, and tried to thwart his application by requiring an original copy of a certificate that was on file in the Bombay High Court and therefore inaccessible. Gandhi was enraged; he knew well that the true reason for these barriers was discrimination. But he didn't let his feelings show. Instead he negotiated patiently, until the Law Society agreed to accept an affidavit from a local dignitary.

The day arrived when he stood to take the oath, at which point the chief justice ordered him to take off his turban. Gandhi saw his true limitations then. He knew that resistance would be justified, but believed in picking his battles, so he took off his headgear. His friends were upset. They said he was weak, that he should have stood up for his beliefs. But Gandhi felt that he had learned "to appreciate the beauty of compromise."

If I told you these stories without mentioning Gandhi's name and later achievements, you might view him as a deeply pa.s.sive man. And in the West, pa.s.sivity is a transgression. To be "pa.s.sive," according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, means to be "acted upon by an external agency." It also means to be "submissive." Gandhi himself ultimately rejected the phrase "pa.s.sive resistance," which he a.s.sociated with weakness, preferring satyagraha, the term he coined to mean "firmness in pursuit of truth."

But as the word satyagraha implies, Gandhi's pa.s.sivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way. Restraint, Gandhi believed, was one of his greatest a.s.sets. And it was born of his shyness:

I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. A thoughtless word hardly ever escaped my tongue or pen. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my s.h.i.+eld and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.

Soft power is not limited to moral exemplars like Mahatma Gandhi. Consider, for example, the much-ballyhooed excellence of Asians in fields like math and science. Professor Ni defines soft power as "quiet persistence," and this trait lies at the heart of academic excellence as surely as it does in Gandhi's political triumphs. Quiet persistence requires sustained attention-in effect restraining one's reactions to external stimuli.

The TIMSS exam (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is a standardized math and science test given every four years to kids around the world. After each test, researchers slice and dice the results, comparing the performance of students from different countries; Asian countries such as Korea, Singapore, j.a.pan, and Taiwan consistently rank at the top of the list. In 1995, for example, the first year the TIMSS was given, Korea, Singapore, and j.a.pan had the world's highest average middle-school math scores and were among the top four worldwide in science. In 2007, when researchers measured how many students in a given country reached the Advanced International Benchmark-a kind of superstar status for math students-they found that most of the standouts were cl.u.s.tered in just a few Asian countries. About 40 percent of fourth graders in Singapore and Hong Kong reached or surpa.s.sed the Advanced Benchmark, and about 40 to 45 percent of eighth graders in Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore pulled it off. Worldwide, the median percentage of students reaching the Advanced Benchmark was only 5 percent at the fourth grade and 2 percent at the eighth grade.

How to explain these sensational performance gaps between Asia and the rest of the world? Consider this interesting wrinkle in the TIMSS exam. Students taking the test are also asked to answer a tedious series of questions about themselves, ranging from how much they enjoy science to whether there are enough books in their home to fill three or more bookcases. The questionnaire takes a long time to complete, and since it doesn't count toward the final grade, many students leave a lot of questions blank. You'd have to be pretty persistent to answer every single one. But it turns out, according to a study by education professor Erling Boe, that the nations whose students fill out more of the questionnaire also tend to have students who do well on the TIMSS test. In other words, excellent students seem not only to possess the cognitive ability to solve math and science problems, but also to have a useful personality characteristic: quiet persistence.

Other studies have also found unusual levels of persistence in even very young Asian children. For example, the cross-cultural psychologist Priscilla Blinco gave j.a.panese and American first graders an unsolvable puzzle to work on in solitude, without the help of other children or a teacher, and compared how long they tried before giving up. The j.a.panese children spent an average of 13.93 minutes on the puzzle before calling it quits, whereas the American kids spent only 9.47 minutes. Fewer than 27 percent of the American students persisted as long as the average j.a.panese student-and only 10 percent of the j.a.panese students gave up as quickly as the average American. Blinco attributes these results to the j.a.panese quality of persistence.

The quiet persistence shown by many Asians, and Asian-Americans, is not limited to the fields of math and science. Several years after my first trip to Cupertino, I caught up with Tiffany Liao, the Swarthmore-bound high school student whose parents had praised her so highly for loving to read, even in public, when she was a young girl. When we first met, Tiffany was a baby-faced seventeen-year-old on her way to college. She told me then that she was excited to travel to the East Coast and meet new people, but was also afraid of living in a place where no one else would drink bubble tea, the popular drink invented in Taiwan.

Now Tiffany was a worldly and sophisticated college senior. She had studied abroad in Spain. She signed her notes with a continental touch: "Abrazos, Tiffany." In her Facebook picture, the childlike look was gone, replaced with a smile that was still soft and friendly but also knowing.

Tiffany was on her way to realizing her dream of becoming a journalist, having just been elected editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. She still described herself as shy-she feels a heat rush on her face when she first speaks in public or picks up the phone to call a stranger-but had become more comfortable speaking up. She believed that her "quiet traits," as she called them, had helped her become editor-in-chief. For Tiffany, soft power meant listening attentively, taking thorough notes, and doing deep research on her interview subjects before meeting them face-to-face. "This process has contributed to my success as a journalist," she wrote to me. Tiffany had come to embrace the power of quiet.

When I first met Mike Wei, the Stanford student who wished he was as uninhibited as his cla.s.smates, he said that there was no such thing as a quiet leader. "How can you let people know you have conviction if you're quiet about it?" he asked. I rea.s.sured him that this wasn't so, but Mike had so much quiet conviction about the inability of quiet people to convey conviction that deep down I'd wondered whether he had a point.

But that was before I heard Professor Ni talk about Asian-style soft power, before I read Gandhi on satyagraha, before I contemplated Tiffany's bright future as a journalist. Conviction is conviction, the kids from Cupertino taught me, at whatever decibel level it's expressed.

Part Four

HOW TO LOVE, HOW TO WORK

CHAPTER 9

WHEN SHOULD YOU ACT MORE EXTROVERTED THAN YOU REALLY ARE?

A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.

-WILLIAM JAMES

Meet Professor Brian Little, former Harvard University psychology lecturer and winner of the 3M Teaching Fellows.h.i.+p, sometimes referred to as the n.o.bel Prize of university teaching. Short, st.u.r.dy, bespectacled, and endearing, Professor Little has a booming baritone, a habit of breaking into song and twirling about onstage, and an old-school actor's way of emphasizing consonants and elongating vowels. He's been described as a cross between Robin Williams and Albert Einstein, and when he makes a joke that pleases his audience, which happens a lot, he looks even more delighted than they do. His cla.s.ses at Harvard were always oversubscribed and often ended with standing ovations.

In contrast, the man I'm about to describe seems a very different breed: he lives with his wife in a tucked-away house on more than two acres of remote Canadian woods, visited occasionally by his children and grandchildren, but otherwise keeping to himself. He spends his free time scoring music, reading and writing books and articles, and e-mailing friends long notes he calls "e-pistles." When he does socialize, he favors one-on-one encounters. At parties, he pairs off into quiet conversations as soon as he can or excuses himself "for a breath of fresh air." When he's forced to spend too much time out and about or in any situation involving conflict, he can literally become ill.

Would you be surprised if I told you that the vaudevillean professor and the recluse who prefers a life of the mind are one and the same man? Maybe not, when you consider that we all behave differently depending on the situation. But if we're capable of such flexibility, does it even make sense to chart the differences between introverts and extroverts? Is the very notion of introversion-extroversion too pat a dichotomy: the introvert as sage philosopher, the extrovert as fearless leader? The introvert as poet or science nerd, the extrovert as jock or cheerleader? Aren't we all a little of both?

Psychologists call this the "person-situation" debate: Do fixed personality traits really exist, or do they s.h.i.+ft according to the situation in which people find themselves? If you talk to Professor Little, he'll tell you that despite his public persona and his teaching accolades, he's a true blue, off-the-charts introvert, not only behaviorally but also neurophysiologically (he took the lemon juice test I described in chapter 4 and salivated right on cue). This would seem to place him squarely on the "person" side of the debate: Little believes that personality traits exist, that they shape our lives in profound ways, that they're based on physiological mechanisms, and that they're relatively stable across a lifespan. Those who take this view stand on broad shoulders: Hippocrates, Milton, Schopenhauer, Jung, and more recently the prophets of fMRI machines and skin conductance tests.

On the other side of the debate are a group of psychologists known as the Situationists. Situationism posits that our generalizations about people, including the words we use to describe one another-shy, aggressive, conscientious, agreeable-are misleading. There is no core self; there are only the various selves of Situations X, Y, and Z. The Situationist view rose to prominence in 1968 when the psychologist Walter Mischel published Personality and a.s.sessment, challenging the idea of fixed personality traits. Mischel argued that situational factors predict the behavior of people like Brian Little much better than supposed personality traits.

For the next few decades, Situationism prevailed. The postmodern view of self that emerged around this time, influenced by theorists like Erving Goffman, author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, suggested that social life is performance and social masks are our true selves. Many researchers doubted whether personality traits even existed in any meaningful sense. Personality researchers had trouble finding jobs.

But just as the nature-nurture debate was replaced with interactionism-the insight that both factors contribute to who we are, and indeed influence each other-so has the person-situation debate been superseded by a more nuanced understanding. Personality psychologists acknowledge that we can feel sociable at 6:00 p.m. and solitary at 10:00 p.m., and that these fluctuations are real and situation-dependent. But they also emphasize how much evidence has emerged to support the premise that notwithstanding these variations, there truly is such a thing as a fixed personality.

These days, even Mischel admits that personality traits exist, but he believes they tend to occur in patterns. For example, some people are aggressive with peers and subordinates but docile with authority figures; others are just the opposite. People who are "rejection-sensitive" are warm and loving when they feel secure, hostile and controlling when they feel rejected.

But this comfortable compromise raises a variation on the problem of free will that we explored in chapter 5. We know that there are physiological limits on who we are and how we act. But should we attempt to manipulate our behavior within the range available to us, or should we simply be true to ourselves? At what point does controlling our behavior become futile, or exhausting?

If you're an introvert in corporate America, should you try to save your true self for quiet weekends and spend your weekdays striving to "get out there, mix, speak more often, and connect with your team and others, deploying all the energy and personality you can muster," as Jack Welch advised in a BusinessWeek online column? If you're an extroverted university student, should you save your true self for rowdy weekends and spend your weekdays focusing and studying? Can people fine-tune their own personalities this way?

The only good answer I've heard to these questions comes from Professor Brian Little.

On the morning of October 12, 1979, Little visited the Royal Military College Saint-Jean on the Richelieu River, forty kilometers south of Montreal, to address a group of senior military officers. As an introvert might be expected to do, he'd prepared thoroughly for the speech, not only rehearsing his remarks but also making sure he could cite the latest research. Even while delivering his talk, he was in what he calls cla.s.sic introvert mode, continually scanning the room for audience displeasure and making adjustments as needed-a statistical reference here, a dollop of humor there.

The speech was a success (so much so that he would be invited to make it every year). But the next invitation the college extended horrified him: to join the top bra.s.s for lunch. Little had to deliver another lecture that afternoon, and he knew that making small talk for an hour and a half would wipe him out. He needed to recharge for his afternoon performance.

Thinking quickly, he announced that he had a pa.s.sion for s.h.i.+p design and asked his hosts if he might instead take the opportunity of his visit to admire the boats pa.s.sing by on the Richelieu River. He then spent his lunch hour strolling up and down the river pathway with an appreciative expression on his face.