لخّصلي

When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time.And m packed me a suitcase full of books, which me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to d Because in my family, reading was the pr group activity.And this might sound antiso to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social.You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your ownmind.And is idea that camp was going to be just ike this, but better.I had a vision of ten girls adv the we s rowd me a cabin cozily reading books in their wh rec els tir matching nightgowns [O]n the very firstday, our counselor gathered us all together and taught us a cheer that she aid we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit.And it went like this: "ROWD-1-E, that's the way we spellrowdie! Rowdy, rowdy, let's get rowdie!".. .I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly.But I recited...the cheer along with everybody else.I did my best.And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.Butthefirsttime that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up the to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?"-mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of ROWDIE.Andthen the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.And so I put my books away,backin their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer.I felt kind of guilty about this.I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and be th ex th th th theywere callingout to me and I was forsaking them.But...I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer.Now, I tell you this story about su it the times that I got the message th somehow my quiet and introverted I could have told you 50 others just hr ca of that I should be trying to passy to retty excellent just as they were.But fo the writer that Ihad always longed to be really would have preferred to just have a nice being was not necessarily the right way to go,that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert.And I always sensed de that this was wrong and that introv or years I denied this intuition ecame a Wall Streetlawyer, of all things, insad partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive, too.was always going off to crowded bars And |when dinner with friends.I made these self-negating choices so refle xively thatI wasn't even aware that I was a them.Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our olleagues' loss and our communities' loss.And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss.Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best.... WJhen 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.[Charles] Darwin.. .took long walks alone in the woods and emphaticaity turned down dinner party invitations..Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time.And he says that he never would have become 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 coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer-but it does mean that solitude matters, and that for some people it is the air that they breathe.. This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring and mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal ...things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that's what you're doing. And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas... You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not.