Susan Cain: How many of us are actually introverts? | Andrew Yang | Yang Speaks

now of course we're in the the age of zoom well do all those meetings that you're doing actually need to be conducted via video because for a lot of people and this is true for extroverts too um the video component of zoom adds a whole other layer of exhaustion um for lots of reasons that we could talk about and is it really necessary a lot of people listening to this are like um like praise be if i could just turn off the videos exactly yeah there's so many things wrong with um with video conferencing but i think the biggest really is the way in which you can't make you have this choice between you know staring into the camera in order to make it seem as if you're having eye contact with a person versus are you actually having eye contact with the person who you're looking at i think that that's especially an especially exhausting dilemma for introverts because if you're somebody who is not always so comfortable with every social interaction one of the best ways to override that discomfort is through tapping into your natural empathy and your natural curiosity for the person who you're speaking with and when you can't actually look them in the eye without them feeling as if you're not looking them in the eye that interrupts that whole process yeah the the am i looking at the camera am i looking at the person's face choice it's an awful choice [Music] welcome back to yank speaks this is your co-host zach grauman doing a quick intro before we hop into the episode i hope you guys are well this is one of our first in a while audio only episodes of yang speaks now why are we audio only i know many of you very disappointed not to see our beautiful or funny looking faces depending who you're asking but the reality is the news of the week andrew yang has coronavirus it's very scary as always um to get the virus we're all locked down for um but he's doing well he's feeling better he feels like he has a heavy flu thank you all for many of you have tweeted and commented instagram to send some love and we've passed that on to him and he sees it and the reality is he's one of the hardest working people i've ever met he's an energizer bunny just keeps going and going so he's like we're doing the podcast let's go we're doing it um we're just not gonna put it on video because i look like crap it's true he's kind of been uh in a state of sick quarantine which is not fun um for anyone particularly him so thoughts and prayers to andrew he's feeling better he'll be back on his feet very soon i hope to be back to regular on-camera programming next week so we've got susan kane on today she has written multiple books and does a ton of research on the power of being an introvert um now for those of you listening who are extroverts like me i'm if i do the myers-briggs test i am 100 an extrovert the cross i bear folks i'm just uh like i get my energy um from people and that is in many ways awesome um because there's a lot of things in society that are set up for extroverts but in other ways it can put people off and so i learned a lot by understanding helping um have susan explain how introversion works and how people can get energy from themselves which is what introverts are and i know andrew's an introvert and he's taught me a lot about this as well so i think you guys are going to find this one fascinating she is brilliant and um talks about a topic that not a lot of people talk about and i think it's really important for those who listen to this and understanding how human beings are wired how we get our energy um so i hope you guys enjoy a lesson on what introverts are and how to understand them with susan kane here on yang speaks i want to tell you guys about one of the most ultimate life hacks and it's called blinkist and what blinkist is is a shortcut to sounding smart uh at least that's how i see it but reality is it is a way to simplify long books so you can get the gist of and get the main takeaways um it's designed for busy people 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for just our audience go to blinkist.com yang and try it free free for seven days and save 25 off your new subscriptions the blinkist you spell it b l i n k i s d like you blink blinkist.com yang start your free seven day trial and then get some 25 off your new subscription pretty awesome blinkist.com yang [Music] i am so excited to welcome to yang speaks an intellectual role model of mine i've admired for quite some time who actually had a profound impact on my family i don't know if she knows that the author of quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking susan kane welcome susan oh my gosh thank you so much andrew it's such an honor to be here with you and i don't think i knew about the profound impact on your family so i would love to hear about that at some point well our older son was very introverted and so my wife picked up your book and it had a big impact on us as a family it led my wife and i to dig in deeper to our son's nature it turns out that he's on the autism spectrum so it was even more than introversion but i i think your explanation of introversion as someone who gets over stimulated by certain types of situations was something that really hit home for us because our son uh was over stimulated very easily at a young age yeah and there is a real overlap there also for for kids and adults who are on the autism spectrum with that sensitivity to stimulation that is such a big aspect of it that i think people don't they it's not only that they don't understand it i think people aren't aware of the myriad ways that sensitivity to stimulation comes up in day-to-day life like you've probably now become aware of it but you know your average manager let's say thinking about scheduling the 17th zoom call of the day is probably not thinking about the ways in which zoom can be highly over for half the people who are participating in the call i have a running joke susan that i say zoom is powered by human souls yes meaning like the the souls are depleted by the time you're done with the zoom oh my soul is definitely depleted and so i i have this image in my mind of like a giant battery somewhere that that's just like going up in power the more of us you zoom i shouldn't joke because zoom is a very valuable tool but one of the reasons why your book was impactful was that i was a very introverted kid very bookish and nerdy like to read science fiction you know what's wild is in your book you even talk about how asian americans have a tendency towards introversion and then that ends up challenging their self-esteem when they hit 12 years old because they end up hitting an environment that then values different qualities which is something that i experienced so i kind of had that self-esteem challenge at age 12 on it was really difficult it's wild because at this point i am theoretically very extroverted in terms of action but i still feel myself to be an introvert and that definitely was true on the presidential trail when after a full day of campaigning i would often feel very very depleted um and need just to stare into space for a while can imagine and um i you know the first question of course that's going through my mind is your choice of profession and your choice to to pursue the presidency is that something that you're doing um despite your true temperament it's uh what i think uh you refer to in the book as like free trait theory where if you uh really feel strongly about something then you can get yourself to do it i think that was the adaptation i made um well before i ran for president uh it was actually when i tried to start a business in my 20s because like you i was an unhappy corporate attorney um but i lasted only five months at davis pope i i thought to myself at the time that i had gotten the best job i could get based upon schooling um you know like uh davis pope is a great firm and then i said well if i'm going to have the kind of career i want for myself i'm going to have to develop these other qualities those qualities were around entrepreneurship and salesmanship to a degree and so during that time i said okay i guess i'm gonna have to get better at these things if i'm going to be able to have the kind of career i want for myself or impact i want to have it's really interesting to me though because i think you know as somebody who who sees your political career more from afar that one of the strengths that you have is that you come across as a regular person who's in politics as opposed to as a career politician or somebody who's been grooming to be a politician all his life and um and so i i think in a way you're doing what many introverts learn to do which is to make of their natural tendency a strength but to to make it in their own image instead of trying to be some other type of person well thank you once that's very high praise i still wince a little bit if someone calls me a politician honestly um though it's factually accurate i mean like like i don't take it as like a you know an insult or anything so i have to say susan it is almost impossible for a book to genuinely set off a revolution of some kind but i think that your book actually did it [Laughter] and i laughed but you struck such a chord and then there were so many people that were kind of suffering in silence but before your book came along and then it it feels like you kind of unlocked or unleashed all of this uh suffering and potential energy around trying to build workplaces and a society that are more mindful of folks who become overstimulated by various social situations it's it's really been incredible how did you end up plugging into this work initially and then tell us about really the last number of years because this book came out in 2012 and since then you've had two ted talks uh two sequels to the book uh a genuine organization that is actually making a huge difference in people's lives so this is a very long-winded way of asking first did you ever imagine that it was going to reach this level when you first started writing this book oh my gosh not at all um so you know my path was like you i was a corporate lawyer at a very similar firm i was at cleary gottlieb and um but i i had always wanted to be a writer since i was a kid and um and when i stopped practicing i wrote all kinds of things for a few years never tried to publish anything but i was writing plays and essays and poetry and memoir all kinds of stuff and and then i started working on this project about introverts and i thought of it as this quirky project that i was doing on the side for some reason this was the project that i decided i was going to actually try to get published you know as opposed to all the other stuff i'd been writing but even though i was i started working on a book proposal and you know went into the whole publishing thing um yeah i thought of it as my quirky idiosyncratic take on the world um i thought i'd be happy if the book got published and you know and a few people bought it but i had no idea of the nerve it was going to tap when i first started working on it you know for the for the reason that i think you just touched on which is most people have been experiencing what it's like to be an introvert in an extroverted culture in silence no one ever talks about it no one ever did talk about it um so i didn't know that so many people felt that way and i also didn't know so many people who felt that way would be so happy to come forward and start chatting about it as they did but i got my first inkling when my agent and i first pitched the book proposal to the publishing houses and you know it set off this crazy auction and i um started meeting with all the different houses and one by having all these meetings and one by one everybody started identifying themselves as introverts um so i'm sure the publishing world is very introvert heavy it is it is but so this is the thing that kept happening so you could so so that's what i said to myself you know that was when i it was all just beginning and i thought okay well that's just the publishing world that's a really introverted space right because it's book people um but then some years later after i'd written it the book came out and the first thing i did practically was give a ted talk about it um and you know you know ted is this environment of all these sort of mover shaker type people um lots of ceos and people uh kind of striding across the world in one way or another um but in that environment too i i happened to be one of the first speakers and i came off the stage and was immediately surrounded by all these other people all these people who were telling me that they too were secret introverts and they had never talked about it before or they had never even realized it themselves but that's really who they were and uh and this is what started to happen no matter what environment uh i found myself in you know like half the people were talking about how intensely uh this described their story something like a quarter to a half of all people are introverts is that correct yeah that's right there's different studies and so one study found that it was about a third of americans and another study 50 so you know i think we're safe to estimate that it's one out of every two or three people that you know you know so that's a lot of people in your family in your workplace in your campaign anywhere you go [Music] all right this episode of yank speaks is brought to you by literati kids great children's books open up new worlds for discovery and with literary kids you've got this try before you buy subscription book clubs every month literati delivers five vibrantly illustrated children's books bringing the immersive magic reading right to your home literati's age based book club ensures appropriate reads for your budding bookworm whether they're snuggling with you for story time or letting their imagination roam free it's like the one time in 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[Music] so you pitch your book uh there's a frenzy around it you're like huh that's different [Laughter] yeah that's a good way of putting it it was a kind of a bemusement you do a ted talk and you realize that a lot of the techies were introverted nerds too which does not shock me right right chris anderson knew from the beginning um he had a sense that the audience would would resonate so then the book takes off and then what is that time like yeah so then after that it just became um a kind of non-stop whirlwind from one world to another um i mean okay so first of all it was like hundreds or thousands of letters and conversations and so on with just one human after another um talking about how this concept was giving them a sense of permission finally to be who they are who they actually are and that word permission is the word that people use over and over again um like i don't think we realize that the degree to which it just becomes habit for introverts to not feel permission to do what they want to do um you know and it's as some as simple as like okay how are you going to spend your free saturday afternoon you know you might really want to just be hanging out by yourself and there's just this feeling that gets bred into us from a very early age that there's something wrong with that choice so so the first answer to your question is that it was just this incredibly moving and humbling series of conversations with one one person after another you know talking about their life experiences and then the other aspect of it has been watching the ways in which these ideas can really improve institutions you know whether you're talking about schools or sports teams or or companies and i've been so gratified to see how open and willing people are to embrace these these kinds of ideas you know because the message is kind of like well you know as an institution this this if i'm speaking to a school or if i'm speaking to a company the message is well as an institution you haven't been getting it right thus far and and you can imagine that being a message that people would resist but that hasn't happened i've found instead that people are really receptive and you know they get it we're talking about half of our population why would we not want to get it right why why would we not want to make a few tweaks that would harness the energies and the talents of half our population why would we not do that i've seen this adopted now in every kind of institution that you can imagine and it's just incredibly exciting let's say that someone listening to this right now is a manager and he's thinking oh you mean like maybe there's something i can do that will actually help some of my people feel more comfortable or be in better position to produce like what kind of tweaks are we talking about in a typical organization how do they do things customarily and then how might they tweak it well there's really a lot you know the number one thing would be getting this to just be a subject that people talk about readily and comfortably and where you can kind of just joke around with each other about what everyone's temperament is like i'm just thinking of a conversation that i had with a professor bob sutton business school professor and he was talking about how so many so many academics are introverts and that there's a way in which many academic institutions make it comfortable for their professors to be that way and i asked him well what do they do to make it comfortable and he said you know it's it's a kind of intangible thing it's just a kind of joking around of like yeah of course um you're going to want you just taught a class of course you're going to want to go off and take a break now it's just it's an affectionate comfortable easy joking around about these differences so so the first thing i'm talking about is a just a sort of shift of consciousness but in terms of specifics there's a lot um one thing would be to be become more mindful of how many meetings you are having and how many of them are actually necessary and then when you do need to meet um as a staff as a team how how are those meetings conducted and how much exhausting self-presentation is involved as opposed to just the pure exchange of ideas or the pure enjoyment of each other's company um so you know now of course we're in the age of zoom well do all those meetings that you're doing actually need to be conducted via video because for a lot of people and this is true for extroverts too um the video component of zoom adds a whole other layer of exhaustion um for lots of reasons that we could talk about and is it really necessary a lot of people listening to this are like um like praise be if i could just turn off the videos exactly yeah there's so many things wrong with um with video conferencing but i think the biggest really is the way in which you can't make you have this choice between you know staring into the camera in order to make it seem as if you're having eye contact with a person versus are you actually having eye contact with the person who you're looking at i think that that's especially an especially exhausting dilemma for introverts because if you're somebody who is not always so comfortable with every social interaction one of the best ways to override that discomfort is through tapping into your natural empathy and your natural curiosity for the person who you're speaking with and when you can't actually look them in the eye without them feeling as if you're not looking them in the eye that interrupts that whole process yeah the the am i looking at the camera am i looking at the person's face choice it's it's an awful choice it's an awful choice i i it's a really it's a soul disrupting choice it's not just a technical choice but then there's other things that we can do too so things like opening up a meeting with a kind of round robin where everybody is given their appointed time to speak as opposed to having to jockey for position is very helpful for anybody who is either bio biologically introverted or more introverted for reasons of gender conditioning or cultural aspects or whatever the reason there's a lot of different reasons that that some people are going to be a lot more hesitant to feel that they're interrupting someone else or to kind of jockey for air space so the more that airspace can be granted without you having to go through that process the more help the more you might hear from everyone at one of my organizations we had a rubric called substance to word ratio does the person actually deliver like high substance to word um because if someone's just talking a lot but like not that not that um substantively then you know their ratio was low and so this was something that we used as like a signal to people um so that it wasn't just that like to reward volume um but it was trying to point out thoughtfulness i love that was that your idea that was my idea the substance-to-word ratio it was one of like the the rubrics that was used and then after people heard that that was a rubric behavior changes completely because all of a sudden like the people that like to do a lot of talking all of a sudden are like wait a minute maybe i should like uh reign it in a little bit that is so interesting so it actually worked like it actually changed behaviors yeah yeah it did um feel free to adopt anyway i love it i mean the substance toward ratio [Applause] okay raise your hand if you're having a miserable time this pandemic i was talking to my grandma and she said uh that she calls the pandemic the pandamik which is funny because she never swears so she's pushing 90. anyway bless her heart i thought it was hilarious and and so this is one of the reasons we have an awesome sponsor on yang speaks um called better help and it's important any time of year but given this lockdown pandemic we're all enduring right now it's even more um timely and relevant so betterhelp will 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years and now half of the students identify as introverts so i think what was happening before is that people felt like they had to answer the test questions in a way that would make them seem extroverted but now they don't feel that pressure to quite the same extent so i think we are seeing some changes in the culture even though i in general i agree with you um business school culture is probably the most extreme i i actually you know you know from reading the book i kind of plopped down at harvard business school for a while i was researching the book i just found it the most fascinating environment and i went there i i went to do book research there because a friend of mine had graduated and said it was the spiritual capital of extroversion i always remember one guy who i interviewed there who who said there's this feeling of like whatever you've done it doesn't matter how inconsequential the thing was you went to the supermarket you have to figure out a way to make it um an enticing story about that day that you went to the supermarket and he was a substance versus words guy and he felt like he had to just like keep on figuring out ways to raise his hands in class even when he didn't really have anything like value-add to say that sounds like a difficult environment for someone like that yeah yeah um so i would love to see that kind of thing shift um i mean i i'm always intrigued you're probably familiar with the the technique out of amazon where apparently they begin meetings really the week before the meeting starts where the person who's organizing it has to write a whole lengthy memo um detailing everything that they're going to talk about and this all happens way before the meeting then everybody gets to the meeting and they sit down and the first thing they do is for half an hour they sit there together reading silently this memo before they talk about anything and this is apparently an a a a technique that was pioneered by jeff bezos to get everybody actually talking about something meaningful as opposed to just you know what usually happens where people are just sort of going on the fly and not really knowing what they're saying so so susan um you're a parent um you have a two or three kids i have two kids yeah how do you think social media plays into uh introversion for kids in particular and i ask this because i've got one boy who's very um introverted and i have a sense that social media is like the ultimate over stimulation i don't know if you've seen anything um that actually shores up my impression yeah i think it goes both ways because social media is on the one hand it's a way of kids being able to communicate without having to be out there in the social scrum in the same way you know putting aside covered restrictions and stuff but on the other hand social media is a kind of bombardment of constant stimuli all happening at once with a whole lot of social judgment and social evaluation layered in on top of the stimuli so in that way it can be a pretty demanding social environment at that age there's so much the feeling of like that you know the main currency is how many how popular are you how many likes do you have how many followers do you have um how successful are you and and now all of a sudden that's that's all tangibly evaluated for everybody to see that's a very difficult thing i think my lucky star social media media didn't exist when i was a kid because is it when i was like a bookish kid hiding in my room um you know i was alone um it's not like if i took out my phone all of a sudden my classmates were there with me right um i think it's very very difficult for a kid to really escape that because when you're young what other people think about you seems like the entire world exactly and then if you can just access that on a device it strikes me as quite overpowering when in in my life during that time i would literally just be reading some escapist science fiction novel and that was like a much more pleasant way to spend my time than seeing what my classmates were doing or worse yet what they thought about me exactly and i i also think that the um the kind of social connection that it encourages is so much more performative um i'm thinking about my adolescent ears and i you know i'd come home and i had um i had my best friends who i would talk to every night on the phone and it would be like one long one-on-one phone call after another where we would have these real conversations with each other the way of interacting was based on a lot of trust and a lot of intimacy and connection it had nothing to do with performance in the way that everything in social media is and i really worry about that and what we're sacrificing so andrew and i have gotten new mattresses from helix sleep and we love them and now that andrew's in quarantine for coronavirus he has sleep in his kid's room and they do not have a helix mattress for working on that but they do not have one 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dragon um not being described uh and could dig at my time as a lawyer because i thought it was described yeah so i was like this isn't what i was like you know put on this earth to do or my parents immigrated to this country for me to do um so so i wanted to do something i was proud of maybe i really internalized the morality of these like fantasy or science fiction novels but they tended to have like you know someone um overcoming some degree of like challenger adversity for some greater purpose uh and and so i thought well i should try and do that too and that started out with me trying to start a business and failing uh and then working at a series of other startups and then eventually having some degree of success and then the real purpose-driven juncture was when i started this non-profit venture for america in 2011 and that required all sorts of new behaviors um and a lot of it susan is that like i i see what my organization needs and then i try and adapt to fulfill um that that role and so this nascent nonprofit that i started required me to become this spokesperson ambassador type um and so i started taking that on but it was an evolution over time because starting from when i left the law like i had different degrees of customer facing responsibilities another thing that did happen to me when i was young was that i was on the u.s national public speaking and debate team in high school um and uh i ended up competing the world championships in london um so so there was like a period when i was made to think that i was an above average communicator and that time was still based on my nerdiness in my mind like you know it was that i was like you know coming up with good arguments and ideas but at some point i started to feel like i could do these things if i needed to did you have um shyness about being on stage when you were in high school entering those competitions or was it like if you were in the realm of ideas then then you were okay when i was younger i was miserably uh shy of being in the spotlight i remember crying when i was asked to present in front of the class um so much so that eventually the teacher just gave up wow how old were you when that happened uh maybe third or fourth grade something along those lines so what made you do public speaking and debate team in high school like was that a slaying of a dragon in and of itself or was it like you know this is ideas so it's okay one of the things that happened to me susan is that like i i found myself wanting to have different kinds of experiences like i didn't want to cut myself off from various experiences yeah but this is actually kind of true my approach today is that like i'm still just trying to get stuff done like i kind of wanted to have the experience and put myself forward kind of independent of like feeling like i was going to be lauded for it or made fun of for it seems like what you did was set ego aside you were more focused on the thing in and of itself that's what it sounds like i still wouldn't say that i sought it out or thrived on it um like i think that i i went for very very long periods of time without that kind of um experience and was totally fine right right and if there were a way now to be in public service without having to do all the really out there front-facing things that one has to do um would you be perfectly happy my dream susan is that i could just like write things put them out into the world and then people would be like oh that's a great idea we should do that i totally understand i can't even tell you how much it's amazing that you um despite that being your ideal that the path that you've taken is really interesting and well i i just really want to get the thing done yeah and and like i don't um and this is the the tough part about what we're talking about susan is like i i think that often people need a person um to step out there and make a case um certainly that was the case for universal basic income um in the presidential and like someone actually even asked me this and i almost choked um where they were like hey why run for president why not just you know write a book about it and then i was like well one i did write the book and two like do you think anyone would pay attention to like you know a relatively anonymous entrepreneur's book saying hey we should you know what i mean like like that that like not every book is like your book where it actually works [Laughter] i i mean i i'm so taken by that story because i think that you you're an extreme example of what so many introverts experience um like introverts who are out there living fulfilling and successful lives like they may not do it to the degree that you're talking about i i think you're a pretty extreme example um but i certainly don't recommend it i don't know though i mean this is this is one of the things um as somebody who is a kind of introvert advocate this is one of the um the tricky tightropes that i think we all need to walk between um really honoring what our temperament is and building a life that's as constant with that temperament as we can because why wouldn't you um and then on the other hand um needing as brightly you talked about free trait theory which is in my book and it's this theory that is advanced by this amazing guy named brian little a personality psychologist um who talks about how we all in this life should be figuring out what what our core personal projects are and those are the the people and the causes and uh the work that we're really dedicated to and what he says is in the for for the sake of those core personal projects those people who you love things that matter for the sake of those things you can and should be willing to step out of character um as long as you do it from a place that honors who you are and as long as you grant yourself what he calls restorative niches where you get to kind of come back and be who you are and be in your equilibrium and take the day off and you know go take a walk by the lake or whatever it is and um and and so i think a lot of getting life right is walking that balance between just being who you are and doing the stepping out of character um but but also to know that there's like there's such a huge difference between stepping out of character for the sake of of being the proponent of universal basic income if that's what you believe um versus doing it for something that you don't really care about which i think is the dilemma that many people find themselves stuck in well i think that's one benefit of introversion is that if you settle on a belief um you can settle on it very very strongly you know you have like real conviction i agree with that i agree um and i also think like the converse is true that that for introverts they're less likely to get swept up into something just purely for the social benefits of it so they're more likely to kind of do the extra work of crafting a life that really makes sense for them substantively on the public speaking front because i'm sure there's a lot of people who are listening who who wonder about that you know because so many people have a fear of public speaking um and i can tell you like i i used to be completely terrified of public speaking um and now i have this life at least pre-covered where i'm out giving talks all the time to companies and schools and like if you had told me years ago that that would be my life i would have found it ridiculous and impossible but the evolution that i really went through was kind of what you were describing of um of learning when i'm speaking learning to shift my focus from the from the ego of like how am i coming across how are they judging me you know leaving that behind and instead focusing on okay what is the idea that i really want to communicate here and and who is the person in the audience whose life might be different by virtue of having heard this um and i always tell myself if i ever get into that feeling again of of you know of intense jitters before giving a talk i always tell myself well you know if there's one person whose life or whose child's life will be better as a result of hearing this then it's worth it and you're speaking to that person well you've made an enormous difference in a lot of people's lives susan you know my family is just one example if someone wants to find out more about your work the book is quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking at this point you have another book for families yeah so there's a website at quietrev.com um where you can find and that's for quiet revolution so quiet rev.com and on the website you can find resources for companies and for schools and and so on and that website is just out there everything on it is free whatever resources you might want and um and then i also work personally with companies and with schools and in terms of connecting with me online which is something i really love love love to do with people um i'm pretty active on social media on linkedin in um on facebook you can look for me under author susan kane and i'm also on twitter and instagram susan kane the patron saint of introverts you've made the world friendlier for many of us um and just made a lot of people more mindful about uh who they are uh it's incredibly empowering a lot of folks owe you a great debt um and thank you for this conversation this conversation was a restorative niche for me it has been a real pleasure to talk to you and i didn't know that whole background story i hope it's going to be inspiring for people to hear about i know it is to [Music] me you

Channel: Yang Speaks

Views: 8,427

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Id: rC9DlTIh7K0

Length: 49min 24sec (2964 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021