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 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 own mind.

And I had this idea

that camp was going to be just like this, but better.

(Laughter)

I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin

cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.

(Laughter)

Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol.

And on the very first day

our counselor gathered us all together

and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing

every day for the rest of the summer

to instill camp spirit.

And it went like this:

"R-O-W-D-I-E,

that's the way we spell rowdie.

Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie."

Yeah.

So 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.

(Laughter)

But I recited a cheer. I recited a 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.

But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase,

the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me

and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" --

mellow, of course, being the exact opposite

of R-O-W-D-I-E.

And then 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,

back in their suitcase,

and I put them under my bed,

and there they stayed for the rest of the summer.

And I felt kind of guilty about this.

I felt as if the books needed me somehow,

and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them.

But I did forsake them and 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 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.

But now here's where the bias comes in.

Our most important institutions,

our schools and our workplaces,

they are designed mostly for extroverts

and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation.

And also we have this belief system right now

that I call the new groupthink,

which holds that all creativity and all productivity

comes from a very oddly gregarious place.

So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays:

When I was going to school,

we sat in rows.

We sat in rows of desks like this,

and we did most of our work pretty autonomously.

But nowadays, your typical classroom

has pods of desks --

four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other.

And kids are working in countless group assignments.

Even in subjects like math and creative writing,

which you think would depend on solo flights of thought,

kids are now expected to act as committee members.

And for the kids who prefer

to go off by themselves or just to work alone,

those kids are seen as outliers often

or, worse, as problem cases.

And the vast majority of teachers reports believing

that the ideal student is an extrovert

as opposed to an introvert,

even though introverts actually get better grades

and are more knowledgeable,

according to research.

(Laughter)

Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces.

Now, most of us work in open plan offices,

without walls,

where we are subject

to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers.

And when it comes to leadership,

introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions,

even though introverts tend to be very careful,

much less likely to take outsize risks --

which is something we might all favor nowadays.

And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School

has found that introverted leaders

often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do,

because when they are managing proactive employees,

they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas,

whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly,

get so excited about things

that they're putting their own stamp on things,

and other people's ideas might not as easily then

bubble up to the surface.

Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts.

I'll give you some examples.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi --

all these peopled described themselves

as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy.

And they all took the spotlight,

even though every bone in their bodies

was telling them not to.

And this turns out to have a special power all its own,

because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm,

not because they enjoyed directing others

and not out of the pleasure of being looked at;

they were there because they had no choice,

because they were driven to do what they thought was right.

Now I think at this point it's important for me to say

that 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 there'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 I'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 comes 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 Claus-like figure

and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona.

Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer

sitting alone in his cubical

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.

And in fact, we have known for centuries

about the transcendent power of solitude.

It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it.

If you look at most of the world'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 community.

So no wilderness, no revelations.

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, mimicking their opinions.

Even about seemingly personal and visceral things

like who you're attracted to,

you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you