Oddball Power: Introverts as Outsiders
For introverts, four significant advantages of being an outsider can compensate for our divergence from society’s ideal personality.
In a society like ours where extroverts reign as the norm, many introverts grow up being criticized, stigmatized and pressured to conform to expectations that feel uncomfortable for them. Some of these outcasts learn to fit in well enough, while others proudly remain unconventional or do not successfully adjust. Although being odd can cause emotional suffering, research studies show that outsiderhood also has some benefits. Let’s consider those outsider advantages in general as well as how they apply to introverts.
The most well-known advantage of being different from the norm is creativity. When you don’t fit in physically, culturally or socially, you are bound to have perspectives that diverge from the mainstream. That in turn enables you to offer insights or works that are judged original. One finding of psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig’s analysis of biographies of 1,000 eminent people, for instance, was that the creative individuals in his sample group were likely to have been “odd or peculiar” as children and to be considered “different” as adults.
Albert Einstein, for example, had such a speech delay as a child that his parents consulted doctors to determine what was wrong with him. As a schoolboy and teen, he rebelled constantly against accepted ideas to the point where one teacher predicted he would never amount to anything. Many commentators connect his unusual childhood profile with his later scientific originality. Today, the label “Einstein syndrome” describes children who speak much later than average, have a strong will, excellent memory and outstanding skill with numbers, music or technology.
Recent studies of the creativity dividend in business confirm that including various sorts of outsiders boosts a work group’s effectiveness, as measured by objective markers like success in capturing new markets. Introversion is a relevant element of diversity, along with race, gender, class, disability and international experience. I once had an extended back-and-forth with a PR person for a company that was routinely highlighting on its website recent purchases by customers, using their first name, last initial and hometown without their permission. When I called this out as an invasion of privacy, she pushed back, arguing – unconvincingly – that this was an accepted and harmless business practice. Obviously, no one had represented the introvert point of view at her company before they implemented this program.
The second general advantage of being an outsider is greater observational ability. When you don’t comfortably mesh with a group or an environment, you notice and can ponder things that insiders take for granted. Think of how much more alert you are to small details when you travel or when you wander to richer or poorer neighborhoods than those you are used to. In previous Introvert UpThink posts I discussed how the writing of Marcel Proust, Edith Wharton and Agatha Christie was enriched by their keen observations as introverts on the margins of high society.
Third, being an outsider can cause someone to develop an internal engine of productivity or sense of identity, in the face of being disparaged or excluded. Think again of Einstein, who as a nonconformist young scientist couldn’t get hired for a university job. Instead he worked in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, where he could finish a day’s work in two or three hours and spend the rest of the time wrestling with theoretical physics – purely because he wanted to, and free of the pressures he would have faced in a professorial department. In fiction, an example of someone lacking ordinary social bonds developing an independent identity and a strong moral compass is the orphan Jane Eyre. And yes, she was an introvert.
Fourth, outsiders often excel in mental flexibility, because they have intimate knowledge of two perspectives: the expectations of the mainstream world they need to navigate, practically speaking, and their own beliefs, traditions, values and preferences. Immigrants or their children, for example, founded nearly half of the 500 most successful companies in the United States. Likewise, just living abroad and thereby having to adapt to unfamiliar norms has been shown to have the same kind of outsider payoff.
Many introverts are bicultural, too, in the sense that they intimately know how the extroverted majority work and play, along with how they themselves prefer to get the job done and relax. For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous character Jay Gatsby was so spectacularly good at throwing parties that you need to read The Great Gatsby carefully to realize that he himself rarely joined in on the frolicking.
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