407 Powerful Susan Cain Quotes to Inspire You
1. “Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.”
Susan Cain
Introverts, Social Skills, Personal Preferences, Communication Styles, Depth In Conversations
2. “In most settings, people use small talk as a way of relaxing into a new relationship, and only once they’re comfortable do they connect more seriously. Sensitive people seem to do the reverse. They “enjoy small talk only after they’ve gone deep,” says Strickland. “When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.”
Susan Cain Small Talk, Sensitive People, Relationship Building, Emotional Depth, Authenticity
3. “The most effective leaders are not motivated by a desire to control events or to be in the spotlight. They are motivated by the desire to advance ideas and new ways of looking at the world, or to improve the situation of a group of people. These motivations belong to introverts and extroverts alike. You can achieve these same goals – you can be inspiring and motivational – without compromising your quiet ways.”
Susan Cain Effective Leadership, Introverts, Extroverts, Motivation, Social Impact
4. “It makes sense, then, that Westerners value boldness and verbal skill, traits that promote individuality, while Asians prize quiet, humility, and sensitivity, which foster group cohesion. If you live in a collective, then things will go a lot more smoothly if you behave with restraint, even submission.”
Susan Cain Cultural Values, Individuality Vs Collectivism, Westerners, Asians, Social Behavior
7. “In fact, some scientists are starting to explore the idea that reward-sensitivity is not only an interesting feature of extroversion; it is what makes an extrovert an extrovert. Extroverts, in other words, are characterized by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog status to sexual highs to cold cash.”
Susan Cain Reward Sensitivity, Extroversion, Personality Traits, Motivation, Behavioral Psychology
8. “Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.”
Susan Cain Multitasking, Productivity, Cognitive Psychology, Task Management, Attention Research
9. “May I be free from danger. May I be free from mental suffering. May I be free from physical suffering. May I have ease of well-being. The idea is to wish these states first to yourself, then to an ever-widening circle of people: loved ones, acquaintances, the difficult people in your life, and then finally to all beings.”
Susan Cain Self-compassion, Well-being, Mindfulness, Emotional Health, Compassion
12. “Or at school, you might have been prodded to come “out of your shell” – that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans are just the same.”
Susan Cain Out Of Your Shell, Introversion, Societal Pressure, Self-acceptance, Personal Comfort
14. “In a way, education by its nature favors the extrovert because you are taking kids and putting them into a big classroom, which is automatically going to be a high-stimulation environment. Probably the best way of teaching in general is one-on-one, but that's not something everyone can afford.”
Susan Cain Education Dynamics, Extroversion Bias, Classroom Environment, Teaching Methods, Individual Attention
15. “That was exactly what happened – the conformists showed less brain activity in the frontal, decision-making regions and more in the areas of the brain associated with perception. Peer pressure, in other words, is not only unpleasant, but can actually change your view of a problem.”
Susan Cain Peer Pressure, Brain Activity, Decision-making, Conformity, Perception Shifts
18. “This is the final piece of Free Trait Theory. A Free Trait Agreement acknowledges that we’ll each act out of character some of the time – in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time. It’s a Free Trait Agreement when a wife who wants to go out every Saturday night and a husband who wants to relax by the fire work out a schedule: half the time we’ll go out, and half the time we’ll stay home.”
Susan Cain Free Trait Theory, Personality Adaptation, Relationship Dynamics, Compromise, Personal Authenticity
20. “If you’re a teacher, enjoy your gregarious and participatory students. But don’t forget to cultivate the shy, the gentle, the autonomous, the ones with single-minded enthusiasms for chemistry sets or parrot taxonomy or nineteenth-century art. They are the artists, engineers, and thinkers of tomorrow.”
Susan Cain Teaching Strategies, Student Diversity, Introverted Learners, Personal Interests, Future Contributions
21. “To some extent, we've always had an admiration for extroversion in our culture. But the extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century when we had the rise of big business.”
Susan Cain Cultural Admiration, Extroversion, Historical Context, Early 20th Century, Business Influence
22. “Extroverts get better grades than introverts during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high school and college. At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested 141 college students’ knowledge of twenty different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that introverts knew more than the extroverts about every single one of them.”
Susan Cain Academic Performance, Introverts, Extroverts, Educational Achievement, University Studies
24. “If you want your child to learn these skills, don’t let her hear you call her “shy”: she’ll believe the label and experience her nervousness as a fixed trait rather than an emotion she can control. 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 Parenting, Labels, Emotional Support, Self-identity, Nurturing Confidence
28. “You can't pick up a business magazine ever without seeing the word 'collaborate' splashed all over it. I think people are probably feeling assaulted by the need to always be on and always be interacting.”
Susan Cain Collaboration, Workplace Culture, Social Interaction, Professional Demands, Extroverted Expectations
29. “Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham.”
Susan Cain Group Performance, Brainstorming, Research Findings, Adrian Furnham, Productivity
