How to be Successful as an Introvert

This video is sponsored by 365 Data Science. Hey friends, how's it going? Welcome back to another video. Today, I would like to share with you some of the most unfortunate, uncomfortable, introverted situations that I have had in my life. Why are all these people here? There's too many people on this earth. We need a new plague. Number one, I spent an embarrassing amount of time hiding in the bathroom. So I did this pretty much like whenever I felt really uncomfortable or awkward when I don't know anyone. So in school a lot, during lunch, social events, house parties, before and after interviews. Number two, when there were social gatherings and especially house parties. You know the ones that you go to in college? For whatever reason, there were times in which I had to go to the house parties. I would just be very uncomfortable the entire time and I would be like sitting there by myself or kind of like standing in the corner. It's like simultaneously wanting to be part of like the social group, but at the same time wanting to leave too. Let's throw a party. That'll cheer you up. No, it won't. It'll cheer you up. I'll stand in the corner by myself. Number three, I wanted to die at all forms of orientations like school orientations, college orientations. What usually happens is that there would be like small clumps of people that form, right? And then I would kind of like try to get into a group, but then I would stand like half in half out just like super awkwardly and like thinking that probably I should say something. Yeah, I could go on and on. Let me know in the comments below. What would be the most uncomfortable introverted behavior that you have experienced and still remember to this day? I spent a lot of time as a young Tina trying to learn how to be more extroverted like how to make conversation, how to establish trust like body language, eye contact and in work situations, how to network, how to give presentations, how to like get promoted. I feel like over time, especially now I'm able to behave in a fashion that is relatively extroverted at least outwardly. So I think I did these things because I kind of intuitively knew that being extroverted from society's point of view at least would make me more likely to be liked, to be successful, to be happy, whatever that means. And after doing more research for this video, I learned that this intuition is somewhat true to some extent at least, but I also learned that depending on the context that you put yourself into, being introverted can also be a huge advantage. Hello boo. But before I get way ahead of myself, let's actually start off by defining things. So the trait of introversion to extroversion was first popularized by psychologist Carl Jung and it's a central dimension of most personality theories and personality models. So the definition of extroversion is the act, state, or habit of being predominantly concerned with and obtaining gratification for what is outside the self. Extroverted people tend to be energized when around people and they're more prone to boredom when they're by themselves. Now introversion is the state or tendency towards being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one's own mental life. Introverts are people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle through interactions. A key thing to note here is that introversion is not necessarily equal to being shy. You can have quiet and shyer extroverts, but they just kind of like being around people and you can also have very loud introverts. I hate doing things and going anywhere. New experiences suck! So for a pretty long time, I was not really super convinced about the distinction between introversion and extroversion because I think people do tend to flip-flop and it's pretty context-dependent. But after more research, I do think there actually is some pretty solid evidence distinguishing between people who are more introverted and people who are more extroverted. That goes beyond just behavior. So in this video, I'm going to talk about how there actually is a physiological difference between introverts and extroverts. So I know that happiness and success comes in a variety of different forms, but in this video, I'm going to focus mostly in a workplace setting, career-wise. I'll also talk about when it is that you should behave more extroverted and some tips on how to do that and be successful in networking, promotions, things like that. So first, why do people want to be extroverted? Is there actually an advantage of being extroverted? Extroversion is clearly correlated with monetary success. Research shows that childhood extroversion can predict adult success and moving from the bottom fifth of popularity in a class to the top fifth corresponded with a 10% increase in income. Also, the higher up the ladder you go, the proportion of extroverts tend to increase. From around 16% of the general population that is considered very extroverted to almost 60% of very extroverted people who are executives. It seems like you don't actually need to know more to be a leader. If you speak more and you speak often, people actually perceive you as being more of a leader and also that you're more intelligent and you're more knowledgeable, even if you're not. Not only that, extroverts are also luckier because by exposing yourself to more people, you have more opportunities to take advantage of. There's also a strong correlation between extroversion and happiness that has been replicated many, many times. If you're a more introverted kid, society like your parents or teachers generally kind of like tell you to be more outgoing and things like that, right? And I just think like introverted people tend to be less socially accepted and humans in general do have this desire and a need to fit in and be accepted for who they are. So, no wonder people want to be extroverted. Extroverts earn more income, they get promoted more often, they're luckier, and they're happier. So it is all doom for us introverts. What? Well, that doesn't sound good. Okay, no, just kidding. So if you are introverted, don't worry. It's not all doom. This is a classic example of being deceived by averages in which we try to extrapolate information and generalize just based upon averages. There's a lot of behavior studies that try to distinguish between introverts and extroverts, but I actually think the most useful and interesting study is from a physiological perspective. There is this researcher called Jerome Kagan, and he used to be a Harvard researcher studying the biological origins of introversion and extroversion. He did a longitudinal long-term study starting in 1989, which is still going on, in which he got 500 four-month-old infants and did a laboratory exam lasting for 45 minutes. And he has a hypothesis that just those 45 minutes with four-month-old infants, he will be able to predict who will become an introvert and who will become an extrovert. So what did he do for this 45-minute evaluation? Well, he exposed these four-month-old infants to a variety of different stimuli. For example, he showed these infants voices that were recorded, balloons popping, colorful things, and different smells like cotton swabs and alcohol. And he found a huge variety of responses. 20% of these infants cried and pumped their limbs around a lot, and he called this group high-reactives. 40% of the infants were pretty placid and quiet and didn't really like pump their arms, and he called these infants low-reactives. And there was 40% of babies that were kind of just like in the middle. So this is pretty interesting because he thinks that the loud babies will turn into more introverted and quiet teenagers. So in order to evaluate this, he got the babies to come back when they were 2 years old, 4 years old, 7 years old, and 11 years old. When they were 2 years old, he would expose them to other stimuli, such as a lady in a gas mask, which sounds terrifying, as well as a man dressed as a clown, which also sounds terrifying, as well as radio-controlled robots. And when they were 7, they were told to play with kids that they never met. When they were 11, they were given an interview by an unfamiliar adult. They touched on observations such as body language, how much they smiled, as well as interviewed their parents about how they socialized, how many friends they have, if they were risk-takers, if they were shy or bold. And his hypothesis turned out to be supported. A lot of the high-reactive infants did end up turning out to be introverted. While the low-reactive infants turned out to be extroverted. Physiologically, Kagan also found that the high-reactive infants that turned out to be more introverted had more physiological arousal, which is the mechanism that triggers the fight-or-flight response. So there would be an increase in heart rate, changes in blood pressure, pupil dilation, things like that. Introverts tend to be more reactive to stimulation, while extroverts, on the other hand, have a higher threshold for stimulation. And this was kind of like an aha moment for me. It kind of explains why in a room full of people that I don't know, for example, I would feel overwhelmed and then my fight-or-flight responses would kind of start acting up. And it's just generally really exhausting. And that's because I probably have a lower threshold for stimulation. There obviously is a lot of other environmental factors, but there really is a genetic component to how introverted or extroverted you are. This was around 40 to 50% genetic. So even if you're just like, I'm gonna become extroverted now. Ted, I'm gonna teach you how to live. Barney, we met at the urinal. That's probably not gonna, you know, work out that well for you. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. There was a study done at a Newman Lab in which participants would play a game in which they would earn points to trade in for money. This is how the game works. You have 12 numbers and then you are asked to press a button whenever a good number pops up on screen and not press the button when a bad number pops up on screen. So if you press the button on a good number, you would earn points. And if you press a button on the bad numbers, you would lose points. These 12 numbers, some of them were good, some of them were bad. And in order to determine if they're good or bad numbers, you have to figure that out through trial and error. From playing this game, researchers found two interesting things. Extroverts were more impulsive and they tended to act faster in pressing that button with less accuracy. And even more interesting, when extroverts press the button on a bad number, they would actually react by going even faster in the next rounds. On the other hand, if an introvert presses their button on a bad number, they would generally slow down. The reason for this is that extroverts tend to be more reward-driven. So if they lose, they want to like quickly regain that and start winning again. While for introverts, they tend to withdraw and kind of think more carefully to solve the problem. Along with this study, it seems that in general, introverts and extroverts are not different in terms of intelligence as measured by IQ tests. But extroverts tend to be more reward-driven and they're better at making fast decisions. But it's opposite for the introverts. They are at their best when they're thinking about complex problems where you really need to think through things and persevere. So actually, if you want to simplify things to one sentence, extroverts go wide and introverts go deep. So now we know defining traits and what introverts and extroverts are generally good at. Like we can't generalize everything. You can now choose your context and your situation to take advantage of these traits. One of my favorite quotes is from Alain de Botton in which he says that the difference between children and adults is that adults have this ability to change their circumstances. So if you're introverted, you can choose a career and a job within that career that matches your physiology as well as your strengths. Generally, these careers, these jobs are more like intellectual in nature. For example, writers, engineers, scientists, things like that. So within these careers, you also want to really lean into your introverted traits, the strengths that you have. For example, a lot of top musicians as well as athletes are actually introverted even in team sports like Michael Jordan, for example. Given that flexibility of having more time in which he can be alone, he was able to really drill down and just concentrate on improving his skill sets of shooting hoops. And he would do this for hours and hours, kind of like painstakingly figuring out like what are the things that he can improve on and then trying to improve on those things. So in addition to really taking into account your stimulation threshold and choosing the right context and environment and career that is able to allow you to control that amount of stimulation, for us normal folks, here are some practical ways to take advantage of your introverted traits. So first off, if you're in a job in a company that you just feel very uncomfortable being in because they don't value your traits, just know that it's not your problem. Like you have to like fix these problems. You can go to companies and teams out there that will value these traits of persistence, ability to solve complex problems. For example, when I was working at Metta, I had a friend who was a software engineer and he was on a growth team, which is a team that involved a lot of talking to people. It's like a very reactive role and he was just not happy there. He felt like he was stressed all the time. There's just too much stimulation that's going on and he wasn't able to use his advantages. So he switched to a team that was more on backend infrastructure and he is thriving in that situation because that job, even though he's still a software engineer, it gave him that correct context in order to use his strengths. So instead of just trying to fix yourself, you can change the environment around you. Another big tip is that with remote work being so prevalent now, really take advantage of this. I think remote work can be really good for introverts because it allows you to have so much more control over the stimulation around you, the environment, and also set like when your times are. So another really interesting thing I think is the amount of extroversion. It actually depends on the culture and the country that you're from. Like for example, the US is a very very extroverted society as opposed to some like Asian cultures like Chinese culture, for example, in which introversion is actually a lot more priced. So I'm not going to tell you to like move your country or something like that, but it could be something that you consider where if you're doing remote work, it could be that you're working with a company or a team in which they are at a place where introversion is more priced. The bottom line here is that instead of just trying to force yourself to fit into a job or a mold and thinking that there's a deficiency, know that there are traits of introversion that are extremely valuable, extremely priced, and you need to correctly set your context to take advantage of your traits. There are situations in which it's also really important and very advantageous to behave in an extroverted fashion, like with a lot of different workplaces in order to be like successful and get noticed, you do need to do networking, you do need to have like mentorship and like advocate for yourself, things like that. So these things are very important, but the caveat here, this is a very important caveat, is that pretending to be extroverted should be something that is done sparingly, like it shouldn't be part of your day-to-day job and it should only be done for something that you value a lot. In the book Quiet, the author brings up a very interesting point. She says that a lot of introverts are generally in a uncomfortable state when they're growing up. So they almost like accept that the world is such the case and they need to deal with this discomfort. And when they're adults, they just accept the job in which they don't feel comfortable and they're not really taking advantage of their own traits because they think that it just has to be that way, which probably would make you feel very burnt out. Okay, so now let's talk about which of these typically extroverted skills are important for you to develop and how you can actually adapt it to suit your tendencies. Number one is presenting information. In most companies now, there's a lot of ways in order to communicate and present information. So as an introvert, you should take advantage of this. If you feel like it's harder for your voice to be heard in a meeting, what you can do is that you can put together a presentation, for example. You can write an email of the points that you want to discuss and send it to people in that way. You don't need to be the loudest in order to be recognized. But if there's one thing that I highly recommend to people, especially more introverted people in technical positions, is that you should learn to give good presentations, which is a skill that is 100% that you can learn. And I know this because I learned it. Most people in technical fields are absolutely atrocious at presentation. And the best way to start is to hit start. And up comes the toolbar. So if you're a technical person and you can make good presentations, that makes you really stand out. Like you don't have to be absolutely the best. You just have to be better than the people around you. Okay, let's now talk about networking. The definition of networking is the action or process of interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts. I really hate that word networking. And the definition just makes me like I really don't like that as well because it kind of conjures up this image for me in which you approach someone. You're like, hello, nice to meet you. Let us now exchange information and develop a professional contact. You don't actually have to network so hard and try to meet all these people individually because say like if you just network with some people, like the correct people who are very extroverted and very sociable in some ways, the people that they know also become a contact that you can know as well. For example, I don't really like talking to people like just new people. So I became friends with Ken Ji. Ken is a very extroverted person. He has a lot of contacts. He has a lot of friends. So because I'm very good friends with Ken, he can introduce me to people. Work smarter, not harder. Another thing is if you just put work out there, you will find that oftentimes people will come to you. Like when I started posting YouTube videos and I started getting more traction on that, I don't really need to reach out to people anymore. They started reaching out to me because they were interested in talking to me. Now, let's talk about mentorship and promotion. What can be even stronger than just self-advocation is someone who's higher up than you or like a mentor who is able to advocate for you. You don't need to have a bunch of different mentors, just like one or two that really, you know, you have a really close tie with and will advocate for you. Please don't just go up to people and be like, can you be my mentor? Like I get so many emails from people doing that and I'm just like, no, like I don't even know who you are. People generally just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. That's not your strength probably. So you should start doing stuff. And if you actually do stuff and show that interest, then they will be more interested in mentoring you, especially if you can make someone look good, then they will in turn want to help you as well. The biggest takeaway that I hope you get from this video is that introversion versus extroversion is real. Like there is a difference to some extent. And instead of thinking there's something wrong with you and trying to make yourself into more extroverted, try to change the context around you to take advantage of the traits that you have. And finally, there's a lot more ways of doing things than you may initially think. In a specific situation, don't pit your own weaknesses against someone else's strengths. Whether you're introverted or extroverted, data science can be a really good career for you because there's just so much diversity into what the role can look like. Since data science jobs can range in terms of how technical it is, if you choose something that's more technical, that usually allows you to have more freedom to control like the stimulation around you. 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