kreative ideen wohnung selber machen
when i was nine years old, i went off to summer campfor the first time. and my mother packed me a suitcasefull of books, which to me seemed likea perfectly natural thing to do. because in my family,reading was the primary group activity. and this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really justa different way of being social. you have the animal warmth of your familysitting right next to you, but you are also free to goroaming around the adventureland
inside your own mind. and i had this idea that camp was going to bejust like this, but better. (laughter) i had a vision of 10 girlssitting in a cabin cozily reading booksin their matching nightgowns. camp was more like a keg partywithout any alcohol. and on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together
and she taught us a cheerthat she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summerto instill camp spirit. and it went like this: "r-o-w-d-i-e, that's the way we spell rowdie. rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." yeah. so i couldn't figure outfor the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy,
or why we had to spellthis word incorrectly. but i recited a cheer. i reciteda cheer along with everybody else. i did my best. and i just waited for the timethat i could go off and read my books. but the first time that i tookmy book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "whyare you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course,being the exact opposite of r-o-w-d-i-e.
and then the second time i tried it, the counselor came up to mewith a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the pointabout camp spirit and said we should all work very hardto be outgoing. and so i put my books away, back in their suitcase, and i put them under my bed, and there they stayedfor the rest of the summer. and i felt kind of guilty about this.
i felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to meand i was forsaking them. but i did forsake themand i didn't open that suitcase again until i was back home with my familyat the end of the summer. now, i tell you this storyabout summer camp. i could have told you50 others just like it -- all the times that i got the message that somehow my quietand introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go,
that i should be trying to passas more of an extrovert. and i always sensed deep downthat this was wrong and that introverts werepretty excellent just as they were. but for years i denied this intuition, and so i became a wall streetlawyer, of all things, instead of the writerthat i had always longed to be -- partly because i needed to prove to myselfthat i could be bold and assertive too. and i was always going off to crowded bars when i really would have preferredto just have a nice dinner with friends.
and i made theseself-negating choices so reflexively, that i wasn't even awarethat i was making them. now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. and at the risk of sounding grandiose,it is the world's loss. because when it comesto creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doingwhat they do best.
a third to a half of the populationare introverts -- a third to a half. so that's one out of every twoor three people you know. so even if you're an extrovert yourself, i'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sittingnext to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deepand real in our society.
we all internalize itfrom a very early age without even having a languagefor what we're doing. now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understandwhat introversion is. it's different from being shy. shyness is about fear of social judgment. introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation.
so extroverts really cravelarge amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feelat their most alive and their most switched-onand their most capable when they're in quieter,more low-key environments. not all the time --these things aren't absolute -- but a lot of the time. so the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulationthat is right for us.
but now here's where the bias comes in. our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' needfor lots of stimulation. and also we havethis belief system right now that i call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativityand all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.
so if you picture the typicalclassroom nowadays: when i was going to school,we sat in rows. we sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our workpretty autonomously. but nowadays, your typical classroomhas pods of desks -- four or five or six or seven kidsall facing each other. and kids are workingin countless group assignments. even in subjects like mathand creative writing, which you think would dependon solo flights of thought,
kids are now expected to actas committee members. and for the kids who prefer to go offby themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. and the vast majority of teachers reports believing thatthe ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introvertsactually get better grades and are more knowledgeable,
according to research. okay, same thing is truein our workplaces. now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constantnoise and gaze of our coworkers. and when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed overfor leadership positions, even though introvertstend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks --
which is somethingwe might all favor nowadays. and interesting researchby adam grant at the wharton school has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomesthan extroverts do, because when they are managingproactive employees, they're much more likely to letthose employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovertcan, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're puttingtheir own stamp on things,
and other people's ideas might notas easily then bubble up to the surface. now in fact, some of our transformativeleaders in history have been introverts. i'll give you some examples. eleanor roosevelt, rosa parks, gandhi -- all these peopled described themselvesas quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. and they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodieswas telling them not to. and this turns out to havea special power all its own, because people could feelthat these leaders were at the helm
not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasureof being looked at; they were therebecause they had no choice, because they were driven to dowhat they thought was right. now i think at this pointit's important for me to say that i actually love extroverts. i always like to say some of my bestfriends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. and we all fallat different points, of course,
along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. even carl jung, the psychologistwho first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thingas a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. he said that such a manwould be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. and some people fall smack in the middleof the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. and i often think that they havethe best of all worlds.
but many of us do recognizeourselves as one type or the other. and what i'm saying is that culturally,we need a much better balance. we need more of a yin and yangbetween these two types. this is especially important when it comes to creativityand to productivity, because when psychologists lookat the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very goodat exchanging ideas and advancing ideas,
but who also have a seriousstreak of introversion in them. and this is because solitude is a crucial ingredientoften to creativity. so darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned downdinner-party invitations. theodor geisel, better known as dr. seuss, he dreamed up manyof his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had
in the back of his housein la jolla, california. and he was actually afraid to meetthe young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting himthis kind of jolly santa claus-like figure and would be disappointedwith his more reserved persona. steve wozniak inventedthe first apple computer sitting alone in his cubiclein hewlett-packard where he was working at the time. and he says that he never would havebecome such an expert in the first place had he not been too introvertedto leave the house
when he was growing up. now, of course, this does not mean that we shouldall stop collaborating -- and case in point, is steve wozniakfamously coming together with steve jobs to start apple computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some peopleit is the air that they breathe. and in fact, we have known for centuriesabout the transcendent power of solitude. it's only recently thatwe've strangely begun to forget it.
if you look at mostof the world's major religions, you will find seekers -- moses, jesus, buddha, muhammad -- seekers who are going off by themselvesalone to the wilderness, where they then have profoundepiphanies and revelations that they then bring backto the rest of the community. so, no wilderness, no revelations. this is no surprise, though, if you look at the insightsof contemporary psychology.
it turns out that we can'teven be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring,mimicking their opinions. even about seeminglypersonal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefsof the people around you without even realizingthat that's what you're doing. and groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominantor charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation
between being the best talkerand having the best ideas -- i mean zero. so -- you might be following the personwith the best ideas, but you might not. and do you really wantto leave it up to chance? much better for everybodyto go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortionsof group dynamics,
and then come together as a team to talk them throughin a well-managed environment and take it from there. now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? why are we setting up our schoolsthis way, and our workplaces? and why are we makingthese introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go offby themselves some of the time? one answer lies deepin our cultural history.
western societies, and in particular the u.s., have always favored the man of actionover the "man" of contemplation. but in america's early days, we lived in what historianscall a culture of character, where we still,at that point, valued people for their inner selvesand their moral rectitude. and if you look at the self-helpbooks from this era, they all had titles with things like
"character, the grandestthing in the world." and they featured role modelslike abraham lincoln, who was praised for beingmodest and unassuming. ralph waldo emerson called him "a man who does notoffend by superiority." but then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians callthe culture of personality. what happened is we had evolvedan agricultural economy
to a world of big business. and so suddenly people are movingfrom small towns to the cities. and instead of working alongside peoplethey've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselvesin a crowd of strangers. so, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charismasuddenly come to seem really important. and sure enough, the self-help bookschange to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "how to win friendsand influence people."
and they feature as their role modelsreally great salesmen. so that's the world we're living in today. that's our cultural inheritance. now none of this is to saythat social skills are unimportant, and i'm also not callingfor the abolishing of teamwork at all. the same religions who send their sagesoff to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. and the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics
are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armiesof people coming together to solve them working together. but i am saying that the more freedomthat we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own uniquesolutions to these problems. so now i'd like to share with youwhat's in my suitcase today. guess what? books.
i have a suitcase full of books. here's margaret atwood, "cat's eye." here's a novel by milan kundera. and here's "the guide for the perplexed"by maimonides. but these are not exactly my books. i brought these books with me because they were writtenby my grandfather's favorite authors. my grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower
who lived alone in a smallapartment in brooklyn that was my favorite placein the world when i was growing up, partly because it was filled withhis very gentle, very courtly presence and partly becauseit was filled with books. i mean literally every table,every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surfacefor swaying stacks of books. just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to doin the whole world was to read.
but he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this lovein the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 yearsthat he was a rabbi. he would takes the fruitsof each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestriesof ancient and humanist thought. and people would come from all overto hear him speak. but here's the thing about my grandfather. underneath this ceremonial role,
he was really modestand really introverted -- so much so that whenhe delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregationthat he had been speaking to for 62 years. and even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often endthe conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking uptoo much of your time. but when he died at the age of 94,
the police had to close downthe streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of peoplewho came out to mourn him. and so these days i try to learnfrom my grandfather's example in my own way. so i just published a bookabout introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. and for me, that seven yearswas like total bliss, because i was reading, i was writing, i was thinking, i was researching.
it was my version of my grandfather's hoursof the day alone in his library. but now all of a suddenmy job is very different, and my job is to beout here talking about it, talking about introversion. and that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as i amto be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu. so i prepared for momentslike these as best i could.
i spent the last yearpracticing public speaking every chance i could get. and i call this my "yearof speaking dangerously." and that actually helped a lot. but i'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hopethat when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quietand to solitude, we truly are poised on the brinkon dramatic change. i mean, we are.
and so i am going to leave you now with three calls for actionfor those who share this vision. number one: stop the madness for constant group work. just stop it. thank you. (applause) and i want to be clearabout what i'm saying, because i deeply believe our offices
should be encouraging casual, chattycafe-style types of interactions -- you know, the kindwhere people come together and serendipitously havean exchange of ideas. that is great. it's great for introvertsand it's great for extroverts. but we need much more privacyand much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. school, same thing. we need to be teaching kidsto work together, for sure,
but we also need to be teaching themhow to work on their own. this is especially importantfor extroverted children too. they need to work on their own because that is where deep thoughtcomes from in part. okay, number two: go to the wilderness. be like buddha, have your own revelations. i'm not saying that we all have to now go off and buildour own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again,
but i am saying that we couldall stand to unplug and get inside our own headsa little more often. number three: take a good lookat what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. so extroverts, maybe your suitcasesare also full of books. or maybe they're full of champagne glassesor skydiving equipment. whatever it is, i hope you takethese things out every chance you get
and grace us with your energyand your joy. but introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulseto guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. and that's okay. but occasionally, just occasionally, i hope you will open up your suitcasesfor other people to see, because the world needs you and itneeds the things you carry. so i wish you the bestof all possible journeys
and the courage to speak softly. thank you very much. thank you. thank you.