Can you tell us about your brother? Sure.

Yeah, so in a way I've been letting go of my brother my whole life because he was 11 years older and he was one of my favorite people in the world from the time I was very, very small.

And he went to college when I was seven.

So I remember very well just the huge empty gap that his disappearance left when I was little.

But the letting go that you are probably referring to right now is that my brother was one of the very early people to die from COVID in 2020.

He was a doctor at a hospital in New York City and he contracted it very quickly and then had a stroke and passed away.

And it was a time of his life.

Will you explain what the vagus nerve is and how it works inside us?

I'd love to start with one of your foundational principles, and that is how people show up in terms of extroversion and introversion, and I'd love for you to talk about what those are and also to walk us through what you mean by the extrovert ideal.

Well, introversion and extroversion, your listeners have probably heard before of the idea of it being kind of a question of where do you get your energy, that introverts derive energy from a more internal source and therefore like quieter settings and extroverts are kind of the opposite.

And there's so much we could say about what these terms really mean, but I think that's as good a definition as any.

And the way I think to really ask yourself which one am I really, because people lose sight of it, e- especially many introverts do because there's so much pressure from the time we're very small to act extroverted that many introverts come to believe they actually are extroverted until they think about it.

So a couple of questions you could ask yourself.

One would be, imagine that you have a weekend or a vacation and you have no social or professional obligations.

How do you spend that time? Who do you spend it with? How many people do you spend it with? And what kinds of relationships are those people? Like, are you choosing to spend it with the people you know really well, or do you prefer the novelty of meeting new people? So all these things, when you really lift the obligations, tell you a lot about who you are.

In a business world that heavily indexes on positivity, crushing it, just moving forward, how can leaders and all of us effectively communicate vulnerability and to be, you know, emotionally whole when we show up at work? Any ideas about how to do that in the way we relate and communicate?

So I'm just wondering, is there a story you could tell of a time where things looked really good on the outside, but you were struggling on the inside?

Yeah.

I mean, I could tell two stories that happened along the way, I would say.

So first, I became a corporate lawyer, but even though I had wanted to be a writer since I was four years old.

And so I did that through my 20s and into my early 30s, and I did that basically just 'cause I wanted to be able to support myself.

And I kind of, like, really liked it at the beginning, in the way sometimes you like something that feels like a grand, unexpected adventure.

But there definitely came the time about, I don't know, a few years into the whole process of being a corporate lawyer, where I just felt like...

What were the tools, like you recognized, "Okay, something's off," but then what were the tools you used to get through it?

Even, even they, even then when they're not w- w- you know, or first of all, why do we do it? And then, of course, are they, are they actually better or are they actually worse?

Well, um, I think there's two reasons.

One of them is, you know, the very word charisma, uh, means a person who has a kind of magical quality about them, and we all love a magical quality, and it's one of ...

It, it's a great gift to have that, and people like to be around it.

So I mean, that's just one really simple explanation.

Um, but then the other one is this culture that we live in, like the ...

I was talking about before that since the 20th century we have lived in this culture of personality where we're, we're taught from a very early age that, uh, what, what's most important is the ... to be the most dominant, to talk the most.

What is that?

Mm-hmm

... um, you know, I just very dutifully got my newsletter going again because you're, that's one of the things you're supposed to do when you have a book coming out, is have a newsletter.

So I, I did it in this very dutiful way, and this was not through Substack.

It was through a different platform.

Um, and I found that I really loved doing it, and it quickly became not the dutiful thing, but something I really looked forward to.

Um, I just really loved the connection with readers.

And yeah, and, and I guess then a friend told me about Substack, and I started reading other people's Substacks and getting really interested in it, and so I finally made the move over.

But how did you decide what your substack would, would be?

Post a free job today at linkedin.com slash quality.

When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time, and my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do, because in my family, reading was the primary group activity.

And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us, it was really just a different way of being social.

You had the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you were also free to go roaming around the adventure land inside your own mind.

And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better.

I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.

Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol.

[laughs]

Yeah.

So I just memorized their placement.

And now I have no idea where any book is, and I, I feel like that's really telling of how things have shifted.

But I do still have these moments, and they usually happen for whatever reason when we're traveling or on vacation.

It could be business travel, and it could be vacation.I can focus much more...

There's something about removing the everydayness of life and the feeling of, um, of daily responsibilities where I can still get back into that state, which doesn't mean that I'm not still checking my phone more than I wish I were.

Mm

...

And we might because I think it's very confusing to many people when you-- So go ahead.

Yeah.

There's so much to, to say here.

I'll give you first the kind of pop culture definition, which I actually like and was the definition that first spoke to me when I heard it, um, back when I was in, I guess, my twenties.

Um, and, and that is the question of where do you get your energy from? So do you feel more energetic when you're kind of out and about, o-out in the world interacting with a lot of people, or do you feel more energetic when you're, uh, a-alone or, um, in a quieter setting? And I often say to people with this one, you know, imagine that you're at a party that you're truly enjoying with company who you truly love, and then think about how you feel after you've been there for about an hour and a half or two hours.

So if you're an extrovert, it's as if the internal battery that you have has been charged up by this experience, and so now you're full of energy, and you're looking for more.

And if you're an introvert, no matter how socially skilled you might be, and no matter how much you love all those people at the party, your battery has been drained by this experience, and so now you're kind of wishing that you could just press the button and be immediately whisked home.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

He didn't like that feeling of having to be on.

But what he had, and what many introverts have, what introverts by nature do, what quiet people by nature do, is they're tuning in very deeply to their own frequency.

So they're lavishing all their social energy on a few beloved people, and they're lavishing their intellectual energy on a few beloved projects.

So they have a really deep sense of conviction about what they're doing.

So you get somebody like Gandhi, who is full of conviction, and you end up attracting other people who are on that same frequency-

Mm-hmm.

What I always say to people is, "Whatever the emotional pain is that you can't get rid of," and most people have that in their lives, you know, whether it's a pain leftover from childhood or from a grief that has never fully resolved, or w- whatever it might be, "Whatever the pain you can't get rid of, to turn that into your offering, your creative offering or your offering the world in general." And this is something that human beings are primed and designed to do, so it's really interesting when you look at it.

How did you make this decision to give all that up and become a writer?

There was so much that happened before I ever started writing Quiet.

And probably the first thing that happened is I knew from the time I was four years old that I wanted to be a writer.Back then, I thought that being a writer meant being a novelist, and so in college I took classes in fiction writing, and concluded, "Oh, I'm actually not really that good at this." And so I guess that was just a youthful dream that wasn't really real.

And I also, you know, I have a practical side and I wanted to be able to support myself, so I went to law school.

And then I ended up weirdly, like, loving law school.

I found it completely fascinating.

Yeah, and then I started working as a corporate lawyer, and although in a lot of ways I was a very unlikely corporate lawyer, I still had a dream of making partner, I just, you know, really got into the whole thing of it.

(instrumental music plays) And then, of course, the TED Talk hit.

How do you, how can you help people believe this is actually true, that you can be just as successful being very true to yourself versus learning to be an extrovert?

One of the most important things you can do, for whoever is listening in whatever field that you happen to be operating in, is to look for people in your field who have your way of being, who are introverted and who are powerful, and there are so many of them in every field.

So, uh, just to go back to the public speaking example for a second and, but then I'm gonna go out from there.

Um, like, when I was getting started as a public speaker, for me, my, my talisman person was Malcolm Gladwell because he's an incredibly captivating speaker.

He's a self-described introvert, and the power of his speaking is not, you know, being like the super energized showman, um, but rather he's a pretty cerebral person with a lot of interesting stuff to say.

And I thought, "Okay," you know, not, not that my personality is exactly like his, but it's like, okay, that, that's kind of a way that I could be on stage.

I can have interesting things to say that I'm very impassioned about saying.

And so I'm curious what either you have done or what you've seen people do as introverts to set themselves up for more success in a business career.