【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 at i actually love extroverts. i always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. and we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. even carl jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that thereamp。39。s no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. he said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. and some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. and i often think that they have the best of all worlds. but many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other.
　　and what iamp。39。m saying is that culturally we need a much better balance. we need more of a yin and yang between these two types. this is especially important when it es to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them.
　　and this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. so darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner party invitations. theodor geisel, better known as dr. seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in la jolla, california. and he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly santa clauslike figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. steve wozniak invented the first apple puter sitting alone in his cubical in hewlettpackard where he was working at the time. and he says that he never would have bee such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up.
　　now of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating and case in point, is steve wozniak famously ing together with steve jobs to start apple puter but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. and in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. itamp。39。s only recently that weamp。39。ve strangely begun to forget it. if you look at most of the worldamp。39。s major religions, you will find seekers moses, jesus, buddha, muhammad seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the munity. so no wilderness, no revelations.
　　this is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. it turns out that we canamp。39。t even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who youamp。39。re attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that thatamp。39。s what youamp。39。re doing.
　　and groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though thereamp。39。s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas i mean zero. so ... (laughter) you might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. and do you really want to leave it up to chance? much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then e together as a team to talk them through in a wellmanaged environment and take it from there.
　　now if all this is