What is common in these giants: Rosa Parks, Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, and Stephen Wozniak?

It was a Friday evening in July 2019 and I was playing with my kids at the center of a grassland around the children park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
One of my friends called me and complained that his daughter is not sociable at all. She prefers to read a 500 page book in a quiet room rather than watching a kid’s movie with us on Friday evening.
My friend was worried that she doesn’t have friends, and asked me what’s wrong with her?
He has enrolled her in many classes: a kumon math class, a piano class, a traditional folk dance class, a taekwondo class, and a French tutor.
Along with the same complaint, my friend also praised that his daughter is very good in English both in reading and creative writing, but she is lagging behind in French class so that she visits a French tutor two times a week.
He mentioned that all of these classes are either after school or on weekends.
He added  to me that she is only interested in piano class but all other classes she is attending because of his encouragement. I was amazed by what my friend was saying.
He asserted to me that he wants to make his daughter more outgoing and extroverted, because she is too quiet and too shy.
My friend’s main worry was how she walks with life in a world full of extroverts.

“My friend’s main worry was how she walks with life in a world full of extroverts.”

I was shocked when he put his daughter in the pool of introverts and assumed her introversion as her biggest weakness.
He told me about three things that are needed to succeed in life: social relationship, verbal communication, and glamor.
I neither argued with my friend nor gave any suggestions or opinions from my side.
I only told him that you’ve got a gem at home, nurture her love for solitude properly rather than running behind shiny objects all weekend. I remembered John Steinbeck, Nobel laureate writer and author of ‘East of Eden’ who says “All great and precious things are lonely.” The love for loneliness could turn into extraordinary things soon.
Before hanging up the phone, I asked him one question when he said that she finishes a 500 hundred page book in 5 days, “Have you ever finished a 500 hundred page book in five days?”
He doesn’t have any memory of reading such a big book in his recent memory.
I told him that finishing a 500 page book in five days, and practicing piano alone requires monomaniacal focus and good temperament. Susan Cain, the author of an amazing book ‘Quiet’ says that temperament is mostly inborn but personality is growth. I recommend watching Susan Cain’s TedTalk ‘The Power of Introverts.’

After our telephone conversation, many great personality images came to my mind like Abraham Lincoln, the icon of culture. Tony Robbins, motivational tycoon and author of ‘Life Force’. I’ve also watched the live video and his performance and he is the icon of personality. I’ve read the biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the icon of conviction. Likewise, my mind also saw the pictures of Bill Gates and Sir Issac Newton, the icon of focus and reasoning respectively. Everybody represents their own unique genetic code and growth.

Our society still believes that being quiet is not good. We expect our kids to be sociable, outgoing, talkative, and presentable.
We try to teach our kids that extroversion is a necessity but introversion is a weakness.
We push them to go out, make new friends. Not only that, recently we have started to praise them based on the number of subscriptions, likes, and followers in their social media profiles like facebook, instagram, and youtube.

“We try to teach our kids that extroversion is a necessity but introversion is a weakness.”

We aim to make our kid a very good neurosurgeon but at the same time we also enroll them for basketball training and piano class expecting equal excellence in all sectors.
There is nothing wrong with this expectation but we should not forget to read a child’s psychology, physiology, and intuition. There is a science that a kid brings his/her uniqueness roughly fifty percent from genes and fifty percent from a growth environment.
Jerome Kagan, PhD, author of ‘A Young Mind in a Growing Brain’ have done substantial research behind these types of developmental processes in human beings.

My friend enrolled his daughter in various activities but our brain isn’t capable of paying attention to too many activities at the same time. During multiple activities, our brain has to switch back and forth between different tasks that reduces focus and increases tiredness.

I still believe jobs like research scientist or a writer or entrepreneur are more of a thinking job, mostly solitary introverted jobs but during job interviews job seekers fake their thinking personality into charismatic salesman personality.
The good news is that corporations like Amazon and Google have started to break this stereotype, but it will take time to come into its full effect in various sectors.
Our society still labels people who work most of the time alone as erratic, weirdo, eccentric, introvert, screwball, and oddball.
And most importantly “the inadequate”.
These words are still a topic of gossip at the dinner table.

One of my friend’s dad is a talk show host by profession, a very outgoing and sociable person. But his private life at home is quite the opposite. He locks himself inside the quiet room to read and write hours and hours.
He always tells us that if you cannot develop introversion on your deep work, you cannot become an extroverted leader in your field.
“Life is not the business of only extroversion”, he says.

“Life is not the business of only extroversion.”

Worship your conviction, even if it is ridiculed or neglected by society. It is your private life, your lonely moment, your period of reflection and introversion that determines who you are.
If you can not groom listening power then you cannot become a good speaker.
If you can not write a good book then you are less likely to become a good teacher.
If you can not remain quiet then you can not focus on things and cannot become a good observer.

The first time I learned about Rosa Parks in depth from my daughter Alyssa, when she was doing a project about her in school. She was a quiet introvert who initially refused to give up her seat on a bus that brought revolution and she became the mother of the civil rights movement.

Larry Page, the founder of Google, and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.com, two world’s largest websites, are two other introverts. Both have transformed the face of people’s connection across the globe. Both are the synonyms of human connection.

When we remember Stephen Wozniak, Apple co-founder, what comes to our mind? Of course, the iphone in our pocket and the mac laptop on our desk, but very few of us are aware of his introversion, love to work alone. Thomas Edison’s ten thousand failed experiments reminds us why he went to the laboratory on his wedding day. Wasn’t that introversion?

When we wake up at 5 am in the morning to think on a blank sheet of paper while the rest of the world is sleeping, it’s not introversion. It’s a value creation.
My friend complained that his daughter takes a book inside the bathroom. But, in my view, she does it to absorb the author’s few lines in quiet moments. My friend, that is your daughter’s natural progression, that’s what makes her different from others. You don’t have to worry that she is going to be incompetent or abnormal, my belief is she is going to be very creative.

“When we wake up at 5 am in the morning to think on a blank sheet of paper while the rest of the world is sleeping, it’s not introversion. It’s a value creation.”

Charlie Munger, a great investor and author of ‘Poor Charlie’s Almanack’ says that people who spend time alone use many mental models intuitively of what they already know and they are also capable of identifying what needs to be changed. Quiet seekers know that we can not grasp the complex information at once so that we grow gradually from kindergarten up to PhD. I remember in my science class doing retrosynthesis of a complex molecule on a white sheet of paper when nobody is around.
Sometimes quiet moments produce sticking ideas which leave an impression forever.
And these ideas get polished and produce life-changing products and services.

Getting people’s attention as extroverts is not the prerequisite for success.
We as parents demand attention for our kids. We have to teach them how to attract long lasting attention via hard work, dedication, and commitment.
Attention needs a breakage of recurring patterns, but we can still win life by being a quiet person, ignoring the herd.

Warren Buffett‘s biography “The  Snowball’ by Alice Schroeder has shown the world that working alone is not weakness at all, it is a distinct habit to nurture and produces astounding results.

Charles Darwin, an icon of new thoughts, and a solitary nature walker, was an introvert.
Anders Ericsson, a research psychologist and author of ‘Peak’, says that extraordinary comes when you follow solitude for deliberate practice in your field.
We all are born and grow with a spectrum of introversion to extroversion in life, it’s very difficult to find out where we fall in the spectrum but whatever catching point we embrace we have to amplify it, nurture it, and grow it.
As Susan Cain, author of the must read book ‘Quiet’, said “Everyone shines, given the right lighting.”

“Susan Cain: Everyone shines, given the right lighting.”

It is true that few people do the thinking job in a quiet place as a scientist and few others design it as an engineer and few others talk to people for sales and marketing.
All are equally important for our society.
We as a society become a lot better if introverts and extroverts work in unison depending on a person’s natural strength and DNA map.
Finally, I didn’t answer my title, but you know now, including these four giants, almost around forty percent of the world population are introverts.

Conclusion

We as parents worry how our kids walk with life in a world full of extroverts. We try to teach our kids that extroversion is a necessity but introversion is a weakness. In reality, life is not the business of only extroversion. When we wake up at 5 am in the morning to think on a blank sheet of paper while the rest of the world is sleeping, it’s not introversion. It’s a value creation. Susan Cain, the author of the must read book ‘Quiet” says beautifully, “Everyone shines, given the right lighting.”

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

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