This book made me nuts.

I read it before Cain came and spoke to a conference I was running. I thought I should read it so I could speak intelligently about it if I ended up in conversation with her (which was always a risk when I ran conferences¹).

Now excessively extroverted friends and colleagues will call me Shy. Which is what you might think of when you think of Quiet. When I was in grad school, a place where we learned how to administer any number of evaluations – Learning Styles Inventory and, oh, they all blur together² – and the Queen of Evaluations: the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, MBTI for those who know it well.³ I remember the experience of taking it because, as I looked at each question, I heard my mother’s voice in my head telling me what the right answer was. And that was the one I selected.

And then came up INFJ. “I” as in Introvert. Well, that tracked with my life as a shy child, who would hide behind my mother, who would burst into tears when my third grade math teacher called on me, who went the entire 9th Grade with barely speaking to anyone. And it tracked with what my extra-extroverted colleagues told me, that I was definitely an introvert.

And yet, when my grad school professors split the class and sent the extroverts out into the hall and kept the introverts in the classroom. They asked a question, I looked around politely, waiting for someone – anyone – from my cohort to answer, and spoke up. They asked another question. I looked around – no one met my eyes, out in the hall, the extroverts were laughing. Loudly.

“Do people ever flunk the MBTI?” I asked. No, I was told. “Because I think I answered wrong. Can I go out in the hallway with them?” No, I was told, you didn’t answer wrong; you are an introvert. “But I was channeling my mother, who is definitely an introvert. I don’t think I answered how I really feel.”

And that was when I began to wonder if I was not really an introvert – if I was just behaving the way my parents always taught me to act. And I began to wonder what would happen if I stopped behaving the way that I had been trained to act.

And then I read this book.

I was okay with it at first. But then I hit a chapter where she talked about a child of extroverted parents who felt obligated to behave the way that they did, and the pressure they put on that poor child. And I thought about my niece, who her family nicknamed the mayor. Her parents are quiet, introspective, literary – and she was active, outgoing, loud. And she suffered just as much as the child in Cain’s anecdote.

So, okay, two children born in the wrong families. You can’t blame Cain for that. But then she started in on extroverts, making them sound horrible and fake and I started grumbling under my breath.

So I didn’t do so good at the conference. Maybe I got to meet her, quickly shake her hand. Maybe I went off to check that the buffet was set up and do a sound check.⁴ But – I will say that she introduced her new book at that conference, a book called Quiet Power, for young adults – and that was a great book. Much different from this book.

I don’t have it any more. I gave it to my niece – a different niece – who was a true introvert, in hopes that it would help her appreciate her strengths.

1. The one author that I actually got to speak to for more than a moment or two, was Bill Bryson. And he was adorable. He gets the prize for best author to attend a conference I ran. Not like Carol Burnett. ↩︎
2. Although we didn’t learn as many as the OD geeks at NYU who, when we ran into them later at a field trip to Jet Blue’s leadership center, just wanted to compare 360s. ↩︎
3. Since debunked, thank god. ↩︎
4. Yes, I know, introverted. ↩︎