Extrovert and Introvert

Book Recommendation: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that can’t Stop Talking

Author: Susan Cain

‘Since when is solitude one of the Seven Deadly Sins?’

Before reading this book, I have been holding strong faith in the idea of all-rounded personal development. I have always been dedicated to and confident in my ability to improve every single aspect of myself. In order to be successful and satisfied in the real world, I was prone to believe that, one must be as all-rounded as he / she potential can.

The society that we are living in has been promoting us repeatedly with the importance of having an ‘ideal personae’. As a result, it would be easy and unsurprising for the majority of the world population to do whatever they can to shape themselves into one of the ‘perfect human’ that can be recognised everywhere on Earth.

We even provided these ‘perfect human’ with a positive and encouraging name—‘extroverts’.

Extroverts are the one who initiate, who out-speak, who persuade, who socialise, who attract, who have fun, who get better lives. Introverts, on the other hand, give us the impression that they live in their own respective worlds, who hide feelings and thinking deep in minds, who isolate themselves from social lives; who have no friends, who are quiet and walk alone.

These might be the reasons why extroverts are more preferable than introverts. Indeed, the author of this book believes respect for individual human personality has with us reached its lowest point.

She does not try to persuade readers by disproving all of the above phenomenon. Instead, she merely emphasised one important message, as if readers are not remembering anything from the book but this crucial idea: Introverts are equally successful, influential and satisfied as extroverts, just in different ways.

She answered one of the most frequently asked questions in the universe: are we born to be an extrovert / introvert? If we are, can an extrovert transformed into an...