Who benefits society more—the extrovert who loves to talk, mix and team up with people to get things done, and routinely engage in self-promotion, or the introvert who’d rather listen than talk, who’d quietly innovate and create with nary a desire for self-promotion, and who’d prefer getting things done alone rather than teaming up with others?
In her best-selling book
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Broadway Books, 368 pages), Susan Cain argues that America pays a high social cost by giving too much premium to the achievements of its extroverts to the point of grossly undervaluing the social contributions of its introverts. She says that she was prompted to write the book in defense of introverts—a segment that constitutes one-third of the American population—for the same reason that Betty Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique in 1963.
“Introverts are to extroverts what women were to men at that time—second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent,” Cain says. “Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts, and many introverts believe that there is something wrong with them and that they should try to ‘pass’ as extroverts. The bias against introversion leads to a colossal waste of talent, energy, and, ultimately, happiness.”
Cain’s book is not simply a rah-rah pitch for introverts as undervalued members of American society. It is a well-researched, well-told exploration of introversion for the lay reader, using both old and the latest findings in psychological research and neurochemistry as well as many case studies of successful introverts like Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, and Steve Wozniak, each of whom had made remarkable contributions to society, as well as unheralded successful introverts in the various professions. For its erudition, depth, and incisiveness,
Quiet has made it to the top of the
New York Times Science Best Sellers list aside from becoming a highly popular nonfiction best-seller that’s now being translated into 30 languages.
Read Gareth Cook’s “The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance,” an interview of Susan Cain in Scientific American now!Read Judith Warner’s “Inside Intelligence,” a review of Susan Cain’s Quiet, in The New York Times now!Read an excerpt from Susan Cain’s Quiet in the RandomHouse.com website now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Susan Cain, an American writer and lecturer, is an honors graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. After working first as an attorney and then as a negotiations consultant as owner and principal of The Negotiation Company, she left her careers in corporate law and consulting to live a quieter life of writing at home with her family. Her work has been featured in
The New Yorker,
Harvard Business Review,
The Atlantic,
Fortune,
Forbes,
Scientific American, and several other major publications.
Quiet is her first book.
