Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can\'t Stop Talking pdfdrive com

parties—they’re not demonstrating a failure of will or a lack of energy.
They’re simply doing what they’re constitutionally suited for.

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The Lieberman experiment helps us understand what trips up introverts
socially. It doesn’t show us how they can shine.
Consider the case of an unassuming-looking fellow named Jon
Berghoff. Jon is a stereotypical introvert, right down to his physical
appearance: lean, wiry body; sharply etched nose and cheekbones;
thoughtful expression on his bespectacled face. He’s not much of a
talker, but what he says is carefully considered, especially when he’s in a
group: “If I’m in a room with ten people and I have a choice between
talking and not talking,” he says, “I’m the one not talking. When people
ask, ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ I’m the guy they’re saying it to.”
Jon is also a standout salesman, and has been ever since he was a
teenager. In the summer of 1999, when he was still a junior in high
school, he started working as an entry-level distributor, selling Cutco
kitchen products. The job had him going into customers’ homes, selling
knives. It was one of the most intimate sales situations imaginable, not
in a boardroom or a car dealership, but inside a potential client’s
kitchen, selling them a product they’d use daily to help put food on the
table.
Within Jon’s first eight weeks on the job, he sold $50,000 worth of
knives. He went on to be the company’s top representative from over
40,000 new recruits that year. By the year 2000, when he was still a
high school senior, Jon had generated more than $135,000 in
commissions and had broken more than twenty-five national and
regional sales records. Meanwhile, back in high school, he was still a
socially awkward guy who hid inside the library at lunchtime. But by
2002 he’d recruited, hired, and trained ninety other sales reps, and
increased territory sales 500 percent over the previous year. Since then,
Jon has launched Global Empowerment Coaching, his own personal
coaching and sales training business. To date he’s given hundreds of
speeches, training seminars, and private consultations to more than
30,000 salespeople and managers.
What’s the secret of Jon’s success? One important clue comes from an
experiment by the developmental psychologist Avril Thorne, now a
professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thorne gathered
fifty-two young women—twenty-six introverts and twenty-six extroverts

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—and assigned them to two different conversational pairings. Each
person had one ten-minute conversation with a partner of her own type
and a second conversation of equal length with her “dispositional
opposite.” Thorne’s team taped the conversations and asked the