Top 500 Susan Cain Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “People who are aware of their sweet spots have the power to leave jobs that exhaust them and start new and satisfying businesses. They.”

— Susan Cain

402. “Quiet demonstrates just how deep and disturbing is this plague of extroverts – the showoffs, risk-takers, salesmen, charmers, charlatans and politicians.” – New York Post.”

— Susan Cain

403. “It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent.”

— Susan Cain

404. “If there is only one insight you take away from this book, though, I hope it’s a newfound sense of entitlement to be yourself. I can vouch personally for the life-transforming effects of this outlook. Remember that first client I told you about, the one I called Laura in order to protect her identity? That was a story about me. I was my own first client.”

— Susan Cain

405. “Longing itself is divine,” writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss.”

— Susan Cain

406. “Public Speaking–Social Anxiety Center of New York.”

— Susan Cain

407. “Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one’s peers.”

— Susan Cain

408. “Studies have shown that, indeed, introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online that their family and friends would be surprised to read, to say that they can express the “real me” online, and to spend more time in certain kinds of online discussions. They welcome the chance to communicate digitally.”

— Susan Cain

409. “But if our entire population consisted of warriors, there would be no one to notice, let alone battle, potentially deadly but far quieter threats like viral disease or climate change.”

— Susan Cain

410. “Introverts just just don’t buzz as easily.”

— Susan Cain

411. “Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe. The compassionate instinct is also a fundamental aspect of the human success story – and one of the great powers of bittersweetness.”

— Susan Cain

412. “You see this all the time. People ask, ‘How did this happen, how did we pay so much?’ Usually it’s said that they were carried away by the situation, but that’s not right. Usually they’re carried away by people who are assertive and domineering. The risk with our students is that they’re very good at getting their way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going the right way.”

— Susan Cain

413. “Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move.”

— Susan Cain

414. “Many foreign-born professionals experience this; you’re a glorified laborer instead of a leader.”

— Susan Cain

415. “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.”

— Susan Cain

416. “Everyone assumes that it’s good to accentuate positive emotions, but that isn’t correct.”

— Susan Cain

417. “What is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren’t very pleased about it?”

— Susan Cain

418. “It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate.”

— Susan Cain

419. “Philip Muskin told The Atlantic magazine, “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.”

— Susan Cain

420. “We often marvel at how introverted, geeky kids “blossom” into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it’s not the children who change but their environments. As adults, they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them.”

— Susan Cain

421. “Participants in brainstorming sessions usually believe that their group performed much better than it actually did, which points to a valuable reason for their continued popularity – group brainstorming makes people feel attached. A worthy goal, so long as we understand that social glue, as opposed to creativity, is the principal benefit.”

— Susan Cain

422. “And the single most important aspect of personality – the “north and south of temperament,” as one scientist puts it – is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.”

— Susan Cain

423. “She also knows full well that “shy” is a negative word in our society. Above all, do not shame her for her shyness.”

— Susan Cain

424. “No one would choose this sort of painful adolescence, but the fact is that the solitude of Woz’s teens, and the single-minded focus on what would turn out to be a lifelong passion, is typical for highly creative people.”

— Susan Cain

425. “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling,” explains Jon. “They buy because they feel understood.” Jon.”

— Susan Cain

426. “I don’t want my heart to be broken,” they say. Or, “I don’t want to fail.” “I understand,” Susan tells them. “But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”

— Susan Cain

427. “How could you be shy and courageous?”

— Susan Cain

428. “I wonder whether students like the young safety officer would be better off if we appreciated that not everyone aspires to be a leader in the conventional sense of the word – that some people wish to fit harmoniously into the group, and others to be independent of it.”

— Susan Cain

429. “If she still doesn’t want to talk, wait for her. Sometimes she’ll need to decompress for hours before she’s ready. You may find that she’ll open up only during cozy, relaxed moments, like bathtime or bedtime. If that’s the case, make sure to build these situations into the day. And if she’ll talk to others, like a trusted babysitter, aunt, or older sibling, but not to you, swallow your pride and enlist help.”

— Susan Cain

430. “On August 15, 2008, Pete Cashmore, the founder of Mashable, the online guide to social media, weighed in. “Wouldn’t it be a great irony,” he asked, “if the leading proponents of the ‘it’s about people’ mantra weren’t so enamored with meeting large groups of people in real life? Perhaps social media affords us the control we lack in real life socializing: the screen as a barrier between us and the world.”

— Susan Cain

431. “If these statistics surprise you, that’s probably because so many people pretend to be extroverts.”

— Susan Cain

432. “Extroverts, on the other hand, can be so intent on putting their own stamp on events that they risk losing others’ good ideas along the way and allowing workers to lapse into passivity. “Often the leaders end up doing a lot of the talking,” says Francesca Gino, “and not listening to any of the ideas that the followers are trying to provide.”

— Susan Cain

433. “True self-esteem comes from competence, not the other way around. Researchers have found that intense engagement in and commitment to an activity is a proven route to happiness and well-being. Well-developed talents and interests can be a great source of confidence for your child, no matter how different he might feel from his peers.”

— Susan Cain

434. “Not that introverts can’t be eager and enthusiastic, but we’re not as overtly expressive as extroverts.”

— Susan Cain

435. “They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.”

— Susan Cain

436. “In this chapter I focused on the dopamine-driven reward system and its role in delivering life’s goodies. But there’s a mirror-image brain network, often called the loss avoidance system, whose job it is to call our attention to risk. If the reward network chases shiny fruit, the loss avoidance system worries about bad apples.”

— Susan Cain

437. “But what if some kids are less prone to anxiety than others, as is true of extremely low-reactive kids? Often the best way to teach these children values is to give them positive role models and to channel their fearlessness into productive activities.”

— Susan Cain

438. “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 –.”

— Susan Cain

439. “It turned out that the introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call “self-monitoring.” Self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behavior to the social demands of a situation. They look for cues to tell them how to act.”

— Susan Cain

440. “We know this type of person well from literature, probably because so many writers are sensitive introverts themselves. He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men,” the novelist Eric Malpass writes of his quiet and cerebral protagonist, also an author, in the novel The Long Long Dances.”

— Susan Cain

441. “Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas.”

— Susan Cain

442. “Those who value a quiet, reflective life will feel a burden lifting from their shoulders as they read Susan Cain’s eloquent and well documented paean to introversion – and will no longer feel guilty or inferior for having made the better choice!” – MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, author of Flow and distinguished professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University.”

— Susan Cain

443. “Myers-Briggs personality.”

— Susan Cain

444. “These students inhabit a world in which status, income, and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measured ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation.”

— Susan Cain

445. “Our action plan hinged on what the most vocal people suggested,” recalls the classmate. “When the less vocal people put out ideas, those ideas were discarded. The ideas that were rejected would have kept us alive and out of trouble, but they were dismissed because of the conviction with which the more vocal people suggested their ideas.”

— Susan Cain

446. “With an average weekly attendance of 22,000 and counting, Saddleback Church is one of the largest and most influential evangelical churches in the nation.”

— Susan Cain

447. “They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation.”

— Susan Cain

448. “Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but also occurs in more solitary situations.”

— Susan Cain

449. “The people who made it through these boards were not the people with the best ideas. They were the best presenters.”

— Susan Cain

450. “The Highly Sensitive Person.”

— Susan Cain