I Look Back On My Years As

Our Culture Is Biased Against Quiet And Reserved People, But Introverts Are Responsible For Some Of Humanity's Greatest Achievements.

In A Way, Education By Its Nature Favours The Extrovert Because You Are Taking Kids And Putting Them Into A Big Classroom, Which Is Automatically Going To Be A High-stimulation Environment. Probably The Best Way Of Teaching In General Is One On One, But That's Not Something Everyone Can Afford.

Though Shyness Per Se Was Unacceptable, Reserve Was A Mark Of Good Breeding.

Introverts Often Work More Slowly And Deliberately. They Like To Focus On One Task At A Time And Can Have Mighty Powers Of Concentration . They're Relatively Immune To The Lures Of Wealth And Fame.

Schwartz's Research Suggests Something Important: We Can Stretch Our Personalities, But Only Up To A Point. Our Inborn Temperaments Influence Us, Regardless Of The Lives We Lead. A Sizeable Part Of Who We Are Is Ordained By Our Genes, By Our Brains, By Our Nervous Systems. And Yet The Elasticity That Schwartz Found In Some Of The High-reactive Teens Also Suggests The Converse: We Have Free Will And Can Use It To Shape Our Personalities.