Quiet people change the world because they hear things others don’t.
Robert Greene in his bestseller 48 Laws of Power talks about a key rule - Saying less than necessary. He illustrates the importance of this by giving the example of how crabs wait for Oysters to open their shells during full moon, throw rocks into those shells and uses this to eat them. The tweet being be careful when you open your mouth.
The major problems we face today in the world are problems of abundance. Obesity is a perfect example of this. Our love for extroversion and loquacious people has led us to an epidemic, where, we are starting to love the sound of our own voice. Even when listening, we are listening to argue rather than understand.
This issue starts with us idealizing extroverts. Praising extroverts started booming in 1920s when American salesman were needed to sell everything from Ford Model T’s to everyday items in JC Penney. America transformed from a culture of character to a culture of personality.
The popular adoption of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator in organizations led us to type cast leaders and most of them turned out to prefer extroversion. Rather than intropecting why this happened we started curating more leaders who preferred extroversion. The usage of Powerpoint to decide on key issues, quick talent presentations, elevator speeches and misunderstanding of introversion didn't help as well.
Introversion differs from shyness. Shy people may be uncomfortable around people where introverts are often socially adept and need less external stimulation to function well, work more slowly and deliberately and like focusing on one task at a time, prefer to devote social energies to close friends, family and colleagues, listen more than they talk.
Minimalism can be defined as striving to only use things that serve a purpose, and one of the concepts to think about is, do we need more minimalism in our communications. Probably like most things in life, balance is the key here. We need to stop typecasting what a good leader looks like and seek for balance.
Some of the best business decisions can be taken by looking at excel sheets rather than powerpoints.
