Pulse August 2019 | Page 54

conversations With This month, Pulse struck up a conversation with an unlikely source: an introvert. susan cain is the world’s leading expert on unlocking the potential of introverts in the workplace—and she’s an introvert herself. After more than a decade spent practicing law, Cain wrote her bestseller on introversion, Quiet, in 2012 and presented one of the most-watched TED Talks ever. Cain will speak at the opening General Session of #ISPA2019 on September 11 at The Venetian Resort. You can learn more about the General Sessions at attendISPA.com. susan cain Pulse: Tell me a little about yourself and your career before you wrote Quiet. Susan Cain: So, okay…a little about myself. I am the author of Quiet and the chief curator of a website called Quiet Revolution (quietrev.com). And before I wrote Quiet—before I became a writer—I was actually a Wall Street lawyer for almost a decade. And then I quit that. I’d wanted to be a writer since I was four years old, so I quit the law and took up writing, and wrote all kinds of things. A play, a memoir, poetry and so on, and then started writing Quiet. And I’ve been doing that ever since—I’m also right now working on my next book, which is on a completely different topic. P: What drew you initially to a career in law? C: The thing that draws most people: the desire for a stable life in which I could support myself. Once I started practicing, I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I really felt that it was not what I was meant to be doing. I had that sensation very strongly. Even at the same time that I was working 16-hour days and was engaged with it in some ways, in other ways it felt like the wrong career for me. P: Was it as a lawyer that you first began thinking about the ideas that would lead to Quiet? C: Yeah, but not with any understanding that I would ever write about it. That, I had no idea. But the whole time I was practicing as a lawyer, I was always drawn to what would be called the softer- skills side of things. I was always serving on every committee in my firm that had to deal with mentoring, professional development or gender issues. I thought a lot about the ways in which people behaved very differently in meetings and negotiations and so on. But in those days, the main explanation for those kinds of differ- ences tended to be gender and culture and so on—which I do believe are important—but at the same time, personality differences 52 PULSE ■ aUgUSt 2019