Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking Part 8

For years before the day in December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, she worked behind the scenes for the NAACP, even receiving training in nonviolent resistance. Many things had inspired her political commitment. The time the Ku Klux Klan marched in front of her childhood house. The time her brother, a private in the U.S. Army who'd saved the lives of white soldiers, came home from World War II only to be spat upon. The time a black eighteen-year-old delivery boy was framed for rape and sent to the electric chair. Parks organized NAACP records, kept track of members.h.i.+p payments, read to little kids in her neighborhood. She was diligent and honorable, but no one thought of her as a leader. Parks, it seemed, was more of a foot soldier.

Not many people know that twelve years before her showdown with the Montgomery bus driver, she'd had another encounter with the same man, possibly on the very same bus. It was a November afternoon in 1943, and Parks had entered through the front door of the bus because the back was too crowded. The driver, a well-known bigot named James Blake, told her to use the rear and started to push her off the bus. Parks asked him not to touch her. She would leave on her own, she said quietly. "Get off my bus," Blake sputtered in response.

Parks complied, but not before deliberately dropping her purse on her way out and sitting on a "white" seat as she picked it up. "Intuitively, she had engaged in an act of pa.s.sive resistance, a precept named by Leo Tolstoy and embraced by Mahatma Gandhi," writes the historian Douglas Brinkley in a wonderful biography of Parks. It was more than a decade before King popularized the idea of nonviolence and long before Parks's own training in civil disobedience, but, Brinkley writes, "such principles were a perfect match for her own personality."

Parks was so disgusted by Blake that she refused to ride his bus for the next twelve years. On the day she finally did, the day that turned her into the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," she got back on that bus, according to Brinkley, only out of sheer absentmindedness.

Parks's actions that day were brave and singular, but it was in the legal fallout that her quiet strength truly shone. Local civil rights leaders sought her out as a test case to challenge the city's bus laws, pressing her to file a lawsuit. This was no small decision. Parks had a sickly mother who depended on her; to sue would mean losing her job and her husband's. It would mean running the very real risk of being lynched from "the tallest telephone pole in town," as her husband and mother put it. "Rosa, the white folks will kill you," pleaded her husband. "It was one thing to be arrested for an isolated bus incident," writes Brinkley; "it was quite another, as historian Taylor Branch would put it, to 'reenter that forbidden zone by choice.' "

But because of her nature, Parks was the perfect plaintiff. Not only because she was a devout Christian, not only because she was an upstanding citizen, but also because she was gentle. "They've messed with the wrong one now!" the boycotters would declare as they traipsed miles to work and school. The phrase became a rallying cry. Its power lay in how paradoxical it was. Usually such a phrase implies that you've messed with a local heavy, with some bullying giant. But it was Parks's quiet strength that made her una.s.sailable. "The slogan served as a reminder that the woman who had inspired the boycott was the sort of soft-spoken martyr G.o.d would not abandon," writes Brinkley.

Parks took her time coming to a decision, but ultimately agreed to sue. She also lent her presence at a rally held on the evening of her trial, the night when a young Martin Luther King Jr., the head of the brand-new Montgomery Improvement a.s.sociation, roused all of Montgomery's black community to boycott the buses. "Since it had to happen," King told the crowd, "I'm happy it happened to a person like Rosa Parks, for n.o.body can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. n.o.body can doubt the height of her character. Mrs. Parks is una.s.suming, and yet there is integrity and character there."

Later that year Parks agreed to go on a fund-raising speaking tour with King and other civil rights leaders. She suffered insomnia, ulcers, and homesickness along the way. She met her idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote of their encounter in her newspaper column: "She is a very quiet, gentle person and it is difficult to imagine how she ever could take such a positive and independent stand." When the boycott finally ended, over a year later, the buses integrated by decree of the Supreme Court, Parks was overlooked by the press. The New York Times ran two front-page stories that celebrated King but didn't mention her. Other papers photographed the boycott leaders sitting in front of buses, but Parks was not invited to sit for these pictures. She didn't mind. On the day the buses were integrated, she preferred to stay home and take care of her mother.

Parks's story is a vivid reminder that we have been graced with limelight-avoiding leaders throughout history. Moses, for example, was not, according to some interpretations of his story, the brash, talkative type who would organize road trips and hold forth in a cla.s.sroom at Harvard Business School. On the contrary, by today's standards he was dreadfully timid. He spoke with a stutter and considered himself inarticulate. The book of Numbers describes him as "very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth."

When G.o.d first appeared to him in the form of a burning bush, Moses was employed as a shepherd by his father-in-law; he wasn't even ambitious enough to own his own sheep. And when G.o.d revealed to Moses his role as liberator of the Jews, did Moses leap at the opportunity? Send someone else to do it, he said. "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?" he pleaded. "I have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and tongue."

It was only when G.o.d paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the a.s.signment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would be the public face of the operation. "It will be as if he were your mouth," said G.o.d, "and as if you were G.o.d to him."

Complemented by Aaron, Moses led the Jews from Egypt, provided for them in the desert for the next forty years, and brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. And he did all this using strengths that are cla.s.sically a.s.sociated with introversion: climbing a mountain in search of wisdom and writing down carefully, on two stone tablets, everything he learned there.

We tend to write Moses' true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMille's cla.s.sic, The Ten Commandments, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We don't ask why G.o.d chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

If Parks spoke through her actions, and if Moses spoke through his brother Aaron, today another type of introverted leader speaks using the Internet.

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explores the influence of "Connectors"-people who have a "special gift for bringing the world together" and "an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections." He describes a "cla.s.sic Connector" named Roger Horchow, a charming and successful businessman and backer of Broadway hits such as Les Miserables, who "collects people the same way others collect stamps." "If you sat next to Roger Horchow on a plane ride across the Atlantic," writes Gladwell, "he would start talking as the plane taxied to the runway, you would be laughing by the time the seatbelt sign was turned off, and when you landed at the other end you'd wonder where the time went."

We generally think of Connectors in just the way that Gladwell describes Horchow: chatty, outgoing, spellbinding even. But consider for a moment a modest, cerebral man named Craig Newmark. Short, balding, and bespectacled, Newmark was a systems engineer for seventeen years at IBM. Before that, he had consuming interests in dinosaurs, chess, and physics. If you sat next to him on a plane, he'd probably keep his nose buried in a book.

Yet Newmark also happens to be the founder and majority owner of Craigslist, the eponymous website that-well-connects people with each other. As of May 28, 2011, Craigslist was the seventh-largest English language website in the world. Its users in over 700 cities in seventy countries find jobs, dates, and even kidney donors on Newmark's site. They join singing groups. They read one another's haikus. They confess their affairs. Newmark describes the site not as a business but as a public commons.

"Connecting people to fix the world over time is the deepest spiritual value you can have," Newmark has said. After Hurricane Katrina, Craigslist helped stranded families find new homes. During the New York City transit strike of 2005, Craigslist was the go-to place for ride-share listings. "Yet another crisis, and Craigslist commands the community," wrote one blogger about Craigslist's role in the strike. "How come Craig organically can touch lives on so many personal levels-and Craig's users can touch each other's lives on so many levels?"

Here's one answer: social media has made new forms of leaders.h.i.+p possible for scores of people who don't fit the Harvard Business School mold.

On August 10, 2008, Guy Kawasaki, the best-selling author, speaker, serial entrepreneur, and Silicon Valley legend, tweeted, "You may find this hard to believe, but I am an introvert. I have a 'role' to play, but I fundamentally am a loner." Kawasaki's tweet set the world of social media buzzing. "At the time," wrote one blogger, "Guy's avatar featured him wearing a pink boa from a large party he threw at his house. Guy Kawasaki an introvert? Does not compute."

On August 15, 2008, Pete Cashmore, the founder of Mashable, the online guide to social media, weighed in. "Wouldn't it be a great irony," he asked, "if the leading proponents of the 'it's about people' mantra weren't so enamored with meeting large groups of people in real life? Perhaps social media affords us the control we lack in real life socializing: the screen as a barrier between us and the world." Then Cashmore outed himself. "Throw me firmly in the 'introverts' camp with Guy," he posted.

Studies have shown that, indeed, introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online that their family and friends would be surprised to read, to say that they can express the "real me" online, and to spend more time in certain kinds of online discussions. They welcome the chance to communicate digitally. The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend these relations.h.i.+ps into the real world.

What would have happened if the Subarctic Survival Situation had been conducted online, with the benefit of all the voices in the room-the Rosa Parkses and the Craig Newmarks and the Darwin Smiths? What if it had been a group of proactive castaways led by an introvert with a gift for calmly encouraging them to contribute? What if there had been an introvert and an extrovert sharing the helm, like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.? Might they have reached the right result?

It's impossible to say. No one has ever run these studies, as far as I know-which is a shame. It's understandable that the HBS model of leaders.h.i.+p places such a high premium on confidence and quick decision-making. If a.s.sertive people tend to get their way, then it's a useful skill for leaders whose work depends on influencing others. Decisiveness inspires confidence, while wavering (or even appearing to waver) can threaten morale.

But one can take these truths too far; in some circ.u.mstances quiet, modest styles of leaders.h.i.+p may be equally or more effective. As I left the HBS campus, I stopped by a display of notable Wall Street Journal cartoons in the Baker Library lobby. One showed a haggard executive looking at a chart of steeply falling profits.

"It's all because of Fradkin," the executive tells his colleague. "He has terrible business sense but great leaders.h.i.+p skills, and everyone is following him down the road to ruin."

Does G.o.d Love Introverts? An Evangelical's Dilemma

If Harvard Business School is an East Coast enclave for the global elite, my next stop was an inst.i.tution that's much the opposite. It sits on a sprawling, 120-acre campus in the former desert and current exurb of Lake Forest, California. Unlike Harvard Business School, it admits anyone who wants to join. Families stroll the palm-tree-lined plazas and walkways in good-natured clumps. Children frolic in man-made streams and waterfalls. Staff wave amiably as they cruise by in golf carts. Wear whatever you want: sneakers and flip-flops are perfectly fine. This campus is presided over not by nattily attired professors wielding words like protagonist and case method, but by a benign Santa Clauslike figure in a Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt and sandy-haired goatee.

With an average weekly attendance of 22,000 and counting, Saddleback Church is one of the largest and most influential evangelical churches in the nation. Its leader is Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, one of the best-selling books of all time, and the man who delivered the invocation at President Obama's inauguration. Saddleback doesn't cater to world-famous leaders the way HBS does, but it plays no less mighty a role in society. Evangelical leaders have the ear of presidents; dominate thousands of hours of TV time; and run multimillion-dollar businesses, with the most prominent boasting their own production companies, recording studios, and distribution deals with media giants like Time Warner.

Saddleback also has one more thing in common with Harvard Business School: its debt to-and propagation of-the Culture of Personality.

It's a Sunday morning in August 2006, and I'm standing at the center of a dense hub of sidewalks on Saddleback's campus. I consult a signpost, the kind you see at Walt Disney World, with cheerful arrows pointing every which way: Wors.h.i.+p Center, Plaza Room, Terrace Cafe, Beach Cafe. A nearby poster features a beaming young man in bright red polo s.h.i.+rt and sneakers: "Looking for a new direction? Give traffic ministry a try!"

I'm searching for the open-air bookstore, where I'll be meeting Adam McHugh, a local evangelical pastor with whom I've been corresponding. McHugh is an avowed introvert, and we've been having a cross-country conversation about what it feels like to be a quiet and cerebral type in the evangelical movement-especially as a leader. Like HBS, evangelical churches often make extroversion a prerequisite for leaders.h.i.+p, sometimes explicitly. "The priest must be ... an extrovert who enthusiastically engages members and newcomers, a team player," reads an ad for a position as a.s.sociate rector of a 1,400-member parish. A senior priest at another church confesses online that he has advised parishes recruiting a new rector to ask what his or her Myers-Briggs score is. "If the first letter isn't an 'E' [for extrovert]," he tells them, "think twice ... I'm sure our Lord was [an extrovert]."

McHugh doesn't fit this description. He discovered his introversion as a junior at Claremont McKenna College, when he realized he was getting up early in the morning just to savor time alone with a steaming cup of coffee. He enjoyed parties, but found himself leaving early. "Other people would get louder and louder, and I would get quieter and quieter," he told me. He took a Myers-Briggs personality test and found out that there was a word, introvert, that described the type of person who likes to spend time as he did.

At first McHugh felt good about carving out more time for himself. But then he got active in evangelicalism and began to feel guilty about all that solitude. He even believed that G.o.d disapproved of his choices and, by extension, of him.

"The evangelical culture ties together faithfulness with extroversion," McHugh explained. "The emphasis is on community, on partic.i.p.ating in more and more programs and events, on meeting more and more people. It's a constant tension for many introverts that they're not living that out. And in a religious world, there's more at stake when you feel that tension. It doesn't feel like 'I'm not doing as well as I'd like.' It feels like 'G.o.d isn't pleased with me.' "

From outside the evangelical community, this seems an astonis.h.i.+ng confession. Since when is solitude one of the Seven Deadly Sins? But to a fellow evangelical, McHugh's sense of spiritual failure would make perfect sense. Contemporary evangelicalism says that every person you fail to meet and proselytize is another soul you might have saved. It also emphasizes building community among confirmed believers, with many churches encouraging (or even requiring) their members to join extracurricular groups organized around every conceivable subject-cooking, real-estate investing, skateboarding. So every social event McHugh left early, every morning he spent alone, every group he failed to join, meant wasted chances to connect with others.

But, ironically, if there was one thing McHugh knew, it was that he wasn't alone. He looked around and saw a vast number of people in the evangelical community who felt just as conflicted as he did. He became ordained as a Presbyterian minister and worked with a team of student leaders at Claremont College, many of whom were introverts. The team became a kind of laboratory for experimenting with introverted forms of leaders.h.i.+p and ministry. They focused on one-on-one and small group interactions rather than on large groups, and McHugh helped the students find rhythms in their lives that allowed them to claim the solitude they needed and enjoyed, and to have social energy left over for leading others. He urged them to find the courage to speak up and take risks in meeting new people.

A few years later, when social media exploded and evangelical bloggers started posting about their experiences, written evidence of the schism between introverts and extroverts within the evangelical church finally emerged. One blogger wrote about his "cry from the heart wondering how to fit in as an introvert in a church that prides itself on extroverted evangelism. There are probably quite a few [of you] out there who are put on guilt trips each time [you] get a personal evangelism push at church. There's a place in G.o.d's kingdom for sensitive, reflective types. It's not easy to claim, but it's there." Another wrote about his simple desire "to serve the Lord but not serve on a parish committee. In a universal church, there should be room for the un-gregarious."

McHugh added his own voice to this chorus, first with a blog calling for greater emphasis on religious practices of solitude and contemplation, and later with a book called Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture. He argues that evangelism means listening as well as talking, that evangelical churches should incorporate silence and mystery into religious wors.h.i.+p, and that they should make room for introverted leaders who might be able to demonstrate a quieter path to G.o.d. After all, hasn't prayer always been about contemplation as well as community? Religious leaders from Jesus to Buddha, as well as the lesser-known saints, monks, shamans, and prophets, have always gone off alone to experience the revelations they later shared with the rest of us.

When finally I find my way to the bookstore, McHugh is waiting with a serene expression on his face. He's in his early thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in jeans, a black polo s.h.i.+rt, and black flip-flops. With his short brown hair, reddish goatee, and sideburns, McHugh looks like a typical Gen Xer, but he speaks in the soothing, considered tones of a college professor. McHugh doesn't preach or wors.h.i.+p at Saddleback, but we've chosen to meet here because it's such an important symbol of evangelical culture.

Since services are just about to start, there's little time to chat. Saddleback offers six different "wors.h.i.+p venues," each housed in its own building or tent and set to its own beat: Wors.h.i.+p Center, Traditional, OverDrive Rock, Gospel, Family, and something called Ohana Island Style Wors.h.i.+p. We head to the main Wors.h.i.+p Center, where Pastor Warren is about to preach. With its sky-high ceiling crisscrossed with klieg lights, the auditorium looks like a rock concert venue, save for the un.o.btrusive wooden cross hanging on the side of the room.

A man named Skip is warming up the congregation with a song. The lyrics are broadcast on five Jumbotron screens, interspersed with photos of s.h.i.+mmering lakes and Caribbean sunsets. Miked-up tech guys sit on a thronelike dais at the center of the room, training their video cameras on the audience. The cameras linger on a teenage girl-long, silky blond hair, electric smile, and s.h.i.+ning blue eyes-who's singing her heart out. I can't help but think of Tony Robbins's "Unleash the Power Within" seminar. Did Tony base his program on megachurches like Saddleback, I wonder, or is it the other way around?