when i was nine years old i went off to summer camp for the first time. and my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. and this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. you have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. and i had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (laughter) i had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.
(laughter)
camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. and on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. and it went like this: “r-o-w-d-i-e, that's the way we spell rowdie. rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie.“ yeah. so i couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (laughter) but i recited a cheer. i recited a cheer along with everybody else. i did my best. and i just waited for the time that i could go off and read my books.
but the first time that i took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, “why are you being so mellow?“ -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of r-o-w-d-i-e. and then the second time i tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.
and so i put my books away, back in their suitcase, and i put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. and i felt kind of guilty about this. i felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and i was forsaking them. but i did forsake them and i didn't open that suitcase again until i was back home with my family at the end of the summer.
now, i tell you this story about summer camp. i could have told you 50 others just like it -- all the times that i got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that i should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. and i always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. but for years i denied this intuition, and so i became a wall street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that i had always longed to be -- partly because i needed to prove to myself that i could be bold and assertive too. and i was always going off to crowded bars when i really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. and i made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that i wasn't even aware that i was making them.
now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. and at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. a third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half. so that's one out of every two or three people you know. so even if you're an extrovert yourself, i'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. we all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing.
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