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
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