Quiet (17 page)

But of course I've been simplifying the case against face-to-face collaboration. Steve Wozniak collaborated with Steve Jobs, after all; without their pairing, there would be no Apple today. Every pair bond between mother and father, between parent and child, is an act of creative collaboration.
Indeed, studies show that
face-to-face interactions create trust in a way that online interactions can't. Research also suggests that
population density is correlated with innovation; despite the advantages of quiet walks in the woods, people in crowded cities benefit from the web of interactions that urban life offers.

I have experienced this phenomenon personally. When I was getting ready to write this book, I carefully set up my home office, complete with uncluttered desk, file cabinets, free counter space, and plenty of natural light—and then felt too cut off from the world to type a single keystroke there. Instead, I wrote most of this book on a laptop at my favorite densely packed neighborhood café. I did this for exactly the reasons that champions of the New Groupthink might suggest: the mere presence of other people helped my mind to make associative leaps. The coffee shop was full of people bent over their own computers, and if the expressions of rapt concentration on their faces were any indication, I wasn't the only one getting a lot of work done.

But the café worked as my office because it had specific attributes that are absent from many modern schools and workplaces. It was social, yet its casual, come-and-go-as-you-please nature left me free from unwelcome entanglements and able to “deliberately practice” my writing. I could toggle back and forth between observer and social actor as much as I wanted. I could also control my environment. Each day I chose the location of my table—in the center of the room or along the perimeter—depending on whether I wanted to be seen as well as to see. And I had the option to leave whenever I wanted peace and quiet to edit what I'd written that day. Usually I was ready to exercise this right after only a few hours—not the eight, ten, or fourteen hours that many office dwellers put in.

The way forward, I'm suggesting, is not to stop collaborating face-to-face, but to refine the way we do it. For one thing, we should actively seek out symbiotic introvert-extrovert relationships, in which leadership and other tasks are divided according to people's natural strengths and temperaments. The most effective teams are composed of a healthy mix of introverts and extroverts, studies show, and so are many leadership structures.

We also need to create settings in which people are free to circulate in a shifting kaleidoscope of interactions, and to disappear into
their private workspaces when they want to focus or simply be alone. Our schools should teach children the skills to work with others—cooperative learning can be effective when practiced well and in moderation—but also the time and training they need to deliberately practice on their own. It's also vital to recognize that many people—especially introverts like Steve Wozniak—need extra quiet and privacy in order to do their best work.

Some companies are starting to understand the value of silence and solitude, and are
creating “flexible” open plans that offer a mix of solo workspaces, quiet zones, casual meeting areas, cafés, reading rooms, computer hubs, and even “streets” where people can chat casually with each other without interrupting others' workflow.
At Pixar Animation Studios, the sixteen-acre campus is built around a football-field-sized atrium housing mailboxes, a cafeteria, and even bathrooms. The idea is to encourage as many casual, chance encounters as possible. At the same time, employees are encouraged to make their individual offices, cubicles, desks, and work areas their own and to decorate them as they wish.
Similarly, at Microsoft, many employees enjoy their own private offices, yet they come with sliding doors, movable walls, and other features that allow occupants to decide when they want to collaborate and when they need private time to think. These kinds of diverse workspaces benefit introverts as well as extroverts, the systems design researcher Matt Davis told me, because they offer more spaces to retreat to than traditional open-plan offices.

I suspect that Wozniak himself would approve of these developments. Before he created the Apple PC, Woz designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved in part because HP made it so easy to chat with others. Every day at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. management wheeled in donuts and coffee, and people would socialize and swap ideas. What set these interactions apart was how low-key and relaxed they were. In
iWoz
, he recalls HP as a meritocracy where it didn't matter what you looked like, where there was no premium on playing social games, and where no one pushed him from his beloved engineering work into management. That was what collaboration meant for Woz: the ability to share a donut and a brainwave with his laid-back, nonjudgmental, poorly dressed colleagues—who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.

It's 2:00 a.m., I can't sleep, and I want to die.

I'm not normally the suicidal type, but this is the night before a big speech, and my mind races with horrifying what-if propositions. What if my mouth dries up and I can't get any words out? What if I bore the audience? What if I throw up onstage?

My boyfriend (now my husband), Ken, watches me toss and turn. He's bewildered by my distress. A former UN peacekeeper, he once was ambushed in Somalia, yet I don't think he felt as scared then as I do now.

“Try to think of happy things,” he says, caressing my forehead.

I stare at the ceiling, tears welling. What happy things? Who could be happy in a world of podiums and microphones?

“There are a billion people in China who don't give a rat's ass about your speech,” Ken offers sympathetically.

This helps, for approximately five seconds. I turn over and watch the alarm clock. Finally it's six thirty. At least the worst part, the night-before part, is over; this time tomorrow, I'll be free. But first I have to get through today. I dress grimly and put on a coat. Ken hands me a
sports water bottle filled with Baileys Irish Cream. I'm not a big drinker, but I like Baileys because it tastes like a chocolate milkshake. “Drink this fifteen minutes before you go on,” he says, kissing me good-bye.

I take the elevator downstairs and settle into the car that waits to ferry me to my destination, a big corporate headquarters in suburban New Jersey. The drive gives me plenty of time to wonder how I allowed myself to get into this situation. I recently left my job as a Wall Street lawyer to start my own consulting firm. Mostly I've worked one-on-one or in small groups, which feels comfortable. But when an acquaintance who is general counsel at a big media company asked me to run a seminar for his entire executive team, I agreed—enthusiastically, even!—for reasons I can't fathom now. I find myself praying for calamity—a flood or a small earthquake, maybe—anything so I don't have to go through with this. Then I feel guilty for involving the rest of the city in my drama.

The car pulls up at the client's office and I step out, trying to project the peppy self-assurance of a successful consultant. The event organizer escorts me to the auditorium. I ask for directions to the bathroom, and, in the privacy of the stall, gulp from the water bottle. For a few moments I stand still, waiting for the alcohol to work its magic. But nothing happens—I'm still terrified. Maybe I should take another swig. No, it's only nine in the morning—what if they smell the liquor on my breath? I reapply my lipstick and make my way back to the event room, where I arrange my notecards at the podium as the room fills with important-looking businesspeople.
Whatever you do, try not to vomit
, I tell myself.

Some of the executives glance up at me, but most of them stare fixedly at their BlackBerrys. Clearly, I'm taking them away from very pressing work. How am I going to hold their attention long enough for them to stop pounding out urgent communiqués into their tiny typewriters? I vow, right then and there, that I will never make another speech.

Well, since then I've given plenty of them. I haven't completely overcome my anxiety, but over the years I've discovered strategies that can
help anyone with stage fright who needs to speak in public. More about that in
chapter 5
.

In the meantime, I've told you my tale of abject terror because it lies at the heart of some of my most urgent questions about introversion. On some deep level, my fear of public speaking seems connected to other aspects of my personality that I appreciate, especially my love of all things gentle and cerebral. This strikes me as a not-uncommon constellation of traits. But are they truly connected, and if so, how? Are they the result of “nurture”—the way I was raised? Both of my parents are soft-spoken, reflective types; my mother hates public speaking too. Or are they my “nature”—something deep in my genetic makeup?

I've been puzzling over these questions for my entire adult life. Fortunately, so have researchers at Harvard, where scientists are probing the human brain in an attempt to discover the biological origins of human temperament.

One such scientist is an eighty-two-year-old man named Jerome Kagan, one of the great developmental psychologists of the twentieth century. Kagan devoted his career to studying the emotional and cognitive development of children. In a series of groundbreaking longitudinal studies, he followed children from infancy through adolescence, documenting their physiologies and personalities along the way. Longitudinal studies like these are time-consuming, expensive, and therefore rare—but when they pay off, as Kagan's did, they pay off big.

For one of those studies, launched in 1989 and still ongoing, Professor Kagan and his team gathered five hundred four-month-old infants in his Laboratory for Child Development at Harvard, predicting they'd be able to tell, on the strength of a forty-five-minute evaluation, which babies were more likely to turn into introverts or extroverts. If you've seen a four-month-old baby lately, this may seem an audacious claim. But Kagan had been studying temperament for a long time, and he had a theory.

Kagan and his team exposed the four-month-olds to a carefully chosen set of new experiences. The infants heard tape-recorded voices and balloons popping, saw colorful mobiles dance before their eyes, and inhaled the scent of alcohol on cotton swabs. They had wildly varying reactions to the new stimuli. About 20 percent cried lustily and pumped
their arms and legs. Kagan called this group “high-reactive.” About 40 percent stayed quiet and placid, moving their arms or legs occasionally, but without all the dramatic limb-pumping. This group Kagan called “low-reactive.” The remaining 40 percent fell between these two extremes. In a startlingly counterintuitive hypothesis, Kagan predicted that it was the infants in the high-reactive group—the lusty arm-pumpers—who were most likely to grow into quiet teenagers.

When they were two, four, seven, and eleven years old, many of the children returned to Kagan's lab for follow-up testing of their reactions to new people and events. At the age of two, the children met a lady wearing a gas mask and a lab coat, a man dressed in a clown costume, and a radio-controlled robot. At seven, they were asked to play with kids they'd never met before. At eleven, an unfamiliar adult interviewed them about their personal lives. Kagan's team observed how the children reacted to these strange situations, noting their body language and recording how often and spontaneously they laughed, talked, and smiled. They also interviewed the kids and their parents about what the children were like outside the laboratory. Did they prefer one or two close friends to a merry band? Did they like visiting new places? Were they risk-takers or were they more cautious? Did they consider themselves shy or bold?