Skip to main content

Review: Quiet by Susan Cain - The power of Introverts

"Quiet is the most important book published for a decade"
Amazon - Link
Goodreads - Link
Rating *****
Firstly, Highly Recommended !

A book review is never easy. It becomes even tougher if you love the book that you are about to review so much so that you read it at a snail's pace over months, and then don't have excerpts to recall.

Hence, No Spoilers Here, You.

Quiet is an extremely powerful book. The Author, Susan Cain has done extensive research on the topic of Introverts / Extroverts and how the world reacts to each of the personality types.

She has been able to deliver a great narrative on basic understanding of each of the personality types, and how can each one of us react when we encounter people to make all our lives easier, covering diverse perspectives from that of a parent, to a teacher or to simply a friend.

“There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”
This line above, captures so much of the essence being spoken about in the book, which is in complete contrast with what we are taught right from kindergarten. With the emphasis on group activities and being a team player, and calling someone who prefers to do things differently by not speaking up that often, people often end up making deductions that there is something wrong.

Progressively then, we are continuously bombarded about the importance of action and team work, and we lose emphasis on solitude and deep thinking. And this facet is not only applicable at work, but in all our relationships and life: How we work, how we talk, how we party, how we love, how we mentor, how we think, everything. And what most of us fail to realize is, Introverts are the same to Extroverts and vice versa, the way Yin is to Yang. Both are essential pieces for our world and for the human race to survive

Little bit of research, and I realized there is a thought that most people who choose to read this book, are introverts, because it does come across as championing a case for introverts with some flair.

However, being an introvert herself, Cain was able to walk the thin line between over-glorifying and beating about that Introverts live in a world built against them, against being able to quantitatively bring about facts to argue the world's reaction towards the topic and reasons behind the same, and come across unbiased.

I am not really sure, how much of that unbiasedness can I accomplish with this blog. A true litmus test to the statement that I make above, would only happen when an extrovert first reads the book, form their own opinion and then agree with what I just said.

But surely, this is not a book for only introverts. In fact, it is the complete opposite. It is a book for the world. Go, grab a copy now, and read it.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Google Allo - And its Content Ratings on iOS

Google just launched their new messaging app Allo in an already overcrowded market. Now there are plenty of opinions online, that you can read, talking about what are the chances that Allo succeed, so we are not going to talk about it here. However, when trying to download the app on iOS through App Store, an interesting thing caught my attention. The content rating that was given to this messaging app was 17+ with further click ins such as: Nudity, Profanity etc. On the other hand, a simple comparison with WhatsApp (the debatable leader in the market), you'd realize the same has a rating of 4+. Screenshot Dt. 23rd Sept 2016: Taken on India App Store on iPhone Similar to PG ratings on entertainment contents, App Store has the following scale : 4+, 9+, 12+ and 17+ with the varying scales of nudity, profanity, violence and other such adult (not "child" safe) references. But its simply baffling to have such a huge gap between the content rating for tw...

Euro Trotting - The Beginning

Stepping into the 'developed world' for the first time definitely felt strange. I just bring that distinction out simply because it is omnipresent, or atleast made that way by plenty'a people. There is this thing that I really like to do. Always taking a detour on my way to the final destination. What ensued was a layover in Helsinki, Finland. And the view out from the plane window of the Finland landscape covered with snow and what looked like scattered pine trees, was beyond words. Glad that the city had the season's first snowfall just the day before, everything around was much brighter. The thing that struck me the most about Finnish is that they are as 'direct' people as you'd ever find, and they'd call a spade a spade with the straightest possible face. You try and bullshit them, and you'd definitely be sorry. And all this, was not just a passing observation, it's been ratified  by the few that I know out here in Grenoble. Getting back...

The first 31st on an 'alien' land

Dear Blog, One thing you don't want on a 31st is for your day to start with work. And o'course I ain't that lucky. But at-least I got a 'half day' (will someone inform the management that if you reduce 2 working hours from 10, it does not become 'half day'). O'course the thumb rule in such cases says " you take what you get, and be happy  or else you will end up either very miserable or getting fired", neither of which interests me much. The Idea There is a thin line between "A Plan" and "An Idea". I had neither. I only knew this for a fact that no way I will spend this night in my camp. In came Mr. Tejaswi, with some ' amoeba like shit' in his head, to my aid. I will still refrain from calling it a plan, since you cannot be sure of things here in Qatar on days of holiday (family day and stuff like that), although no once can stop you if you are really stubborn and a little innovative. As for The Idea, it had a...