Even when the attention focused on me is positive, I am uncomfortable being looked at by a lot of people - it's just not my natural state of being.

In most job interviews, people say they are looking for people skills and emotional intelligence. That's reasonable, but the question is, how do you define what that looks like?

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.

All personality traits have their good side and their bad side. But for a long time, we've seen introversion only through its negative side and extroversion mostly through its positive side.

you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard's education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of power, but to use well the kind you've been granted.

You're told that you're in your head too much, a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.