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  • If you take a group of people and put them into a meeting and have them talk about something,

  • the opinions of the loudest person or the most charismatic person or the most assertive person, those are the ones that the group tends to follow.

  • And yet, researchers have looked at this.

  • There's no correlation between being that best talker and having the best ideas.

  • Mean, like, zero correlation.

  • I think that we're living in a society now that is so overly extroverted.

  • As we shifted from an agricultural economy to a corporate one,

  • we started to admire people who could be magnetic and charismatic 'cause these were the qualities that seemed to matter for job interviews and things like that.

  • And so, in the earlier agricultural economy, our self-help books used to have titles like "Character: The Grandest Thing In The World".

  • But then the self-help books later on became the ones that we kind of know of today, like Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends And Influence People".

  • And those were all about teaching us to be more entertaining, more dynamic and that kind of thing.

  • I think, for any trait of human nature, any aspect, it has its pros and it has its cons.

  • And what I'm saying is that for too long, we've looked at introversion only through its disadvantages, and we've looked at extroversion only through its advantages.

  • So I'm trying to now fill in the gaps and what that can sometimes sound like is, you're "Down with extroverts, up with introverts".

  • And my vision of the right world is a world where it's yin and yang.

  • You know, and there's space for extroverts and there's space for introverts, and it's equal space.

  • If you look at the birth of Apple, Apple computer, we tend to associate Apple with Steve Jobs, who is this dazzling showman.

  • But really, the person who invented the Apple computer was a different Steve, it was Steve Wozniak, who's a self-identified introvert.

  • And he created this amazing thing by sitting by himself in a cubicle at Hewlett-Packard, where he was working at the time, um.

  • Late at night and early in the morning before anybody was at work, he would work by himself, by himself, by himself, for months.

  • And then he produced this amazing thing that he then shared with his friend, Steve Jobs.

  • And then it was Steve Jobs who said, "Hey! We should start a company with this."

  • "This is amazing!"

  • Without Steve Jobs, none of it ever would have come to pass.

  • Umm, so it was this combination of letting the solitary person go off by himself to think in his deep way, and then having a partnership between the two.

  • And in fact, you know, in companies, it's been found that the most effective teams are the ones that are a combination of introvert and extrovert.

  • And the two types are really drawn to each other and really need each other.

If you take a group of people and put them into a meeting and have them talk about something,

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