In my last-ever real job, some 10 years ago, I was a manager at a 100-person IT company.
Well, not really a manager. I was a scrum master, which might sound either like some kind of S&M role or a made-up demon name from Ghostbusters.
So each each week, I the scrum master and our teams “product owner” (another Ghostbusters-themed managerial role) had to meet with the owner of the company to give him an update on how we were progressing.
We had been working for over a year, building a large piece of software that was one day supposed to be sold to big pharma companies like Glaxo Smith Kline.
But it wasn’t ready yet. Or anywhere close to ready. Our team wasn’t making any money. We were just a giant drain on company resources.
So when we sat down with the owner of the company, he gave us a weary look.
“Tell me guys,” he said a little bitterly, “how many sales have you made this week?”
I put on my straight face. And I shrugged my shoulders as if to suggest it’s all relative. “Do you mean the week starting this Monday,” I said, “or starting Sunday?”
The owner of the company locked his eyes on me. He squinted for a second.
And then he brightened and started to laugh, the joke being that we had never made any sales and it was doubtful we ever would. “All right all right,” he said with a smile, “at least tell me how the development is going.”
Now I don’t have a life history of joshing and ribbing and joking with people who have authority over me.
But I did it in this case, and it worked out well.
The reason I did it — the reason the joke came naturally, at the right moment, on its own — was that the previous few days, I had started walking around town, approaching girls on the street, complimenting them, and even asking them out.
On the one hand, approaching unfamiliar girls in the middle of the street, often in the middle of a crowd, and starting a conversation — well, it was immensely hard.
But it was also very liberating. Literally. There were parts of my brain that I didn’t even know were there that suddenly became active and alive.
And that’s how I found myself spontaneously teasing my boss, and instantly turning him from a bitter to a good mood.
My point being that over the past few years or the past decade, there’s been a lot of celebrating of introverts, and a lot of proud ownership of being an introvert.
Some people even take a holier-than-thou attitude to it, and claim that they alone are the real introverts, while others are just poser-introverts.
Whatever. I’d like to suggest to you that if you think you are an introvert — even a real, natural introvert, the way I thought of myself for years, and which I had very hard evidence for — it’s only one configuration of the person you can be.
Clinging to the idea you are an introvert is little like saying you are a sitting person. Because whenever you see an empty chair, you are tempted to sit in it, and when you do sit, you find it comforting. And then, concluding from that, “Oh no, I’m not a walking type. I just can’t. It drains me. I’m a sitting person.”
And my bigger belief, if you care to know it is this:
You are lots of things. You have different abilities and resources, including those you are not aware of, until you put ourselves into a situation to make use of them.
Yes, it might be immensely hard at first. But it can also be liberating. Literally.
Ok, on to business:
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