now, i tell you this story about summer camp. i could have told you 50 others just like it -- all the times that i got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of 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 deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. but for years i denied this intuition, and so i became a wall street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that i had always longed to be -- partly because i needed to prove to myself that i could be bold and assertive too. and i was always going off to crowded bars when i really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. and i made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that i wasn't even aware that i was making them.
now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' 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. a third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half. so that's one out of every two or three people you know. so even if you're an extrovert yourself, i'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. we all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing.
now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion is. it's different from being shy. shyness is about fear of social judgment. introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. so extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. not all the time -- these things aren't absolute -- but a lot of the time. so the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us.
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