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.

I'm not saying abolish group work - I think there's a time and a place for people to come together and exchange ideas, but let's restore the respect we once had for solitude. And we need to be much more mindful of the way we come together.

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.

Introversion- along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness- is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living in the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

In the first study, Grant and his colleagues analyzed data from one of the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverts—but only when the employees were passive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative. Introverted leaders had the exact opposite results. When they worked with employees who actively tried to improve work procedures, their stores outperformed those led by extroverts by more than 14 percent.

(Finland is a famously introverted nation. Finnish joke: How can you tell if a Finn likes you? He's staring at your shoes instead of his own.)

Do you really believe in what you said or wrote – in the thing that’s bringing criticism? And if I do believe it, I can withstand anything.