Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality – the "north and south of temperament", as the scientist JD Higley puts it – is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them. It governs how likely we are to exercise (a habit found in extroverts), commit adultery (extroverts), function well without sleep (introverts), learn from our mistakes (introverts), place big bets in the stock market (extroverts), delay gratification (introverts), be a good leader (depends on the type of leadership called for), and ask "what if" (introverts).
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Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We're told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. Closet introverts pass undetected on playgrounds and in corporate corridors. Some fool even themselves, until some life event – redundancy, an empty nest, an inheritance that frees them to spend time as they like – jolts them into taking stock of their true natures.
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But we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions – from the theory of evolution to Van Gogh's sunflowers to the personal computer – came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there. Without introverts, the world would be devoid of Newton's theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of relativity, WB Yeats's The Second Coming, Chopin's nocturnes, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Peter Pan, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Cat in the Hat, Charlie Brown, the films of Steven Spielberg, Google (co-founded by introvert Larry Page) and Harry Potter.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/13/why-the-world-needs-introverts
Once the world manages to pathologize introspection and stillness, all the extroverts of the world can hoot and holler and act like idiots while watching football at sports bars and wondering why no one's around to compose music, or invent space travel, or write poetry.