Introversion and Solitude Increase Productivity 214
bonch writes "Author Susan Cain argues that modern society's focus on charisma and group brainstorming has harmed creativity and productivity by removing the quiet, creative process. 'Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They're extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They're not joiners by nature.'"
lol (Score:4, Informative)
Reality check for all the morons who want to turn their office into a fun house.
Introvert (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I knew it all along (Score:4, Informative)
i find it the least bit surprising that all the introverts are on here giving each other pats on the back, because that would be about as much praise as you all get. just because you think you are the most productive and creative thinkers that come up with awesome ideas on your own doesn't mean anybody else thinks that.
teamwork is productive, but teams need strong leadership. lack of strong leadership is more often the problem in any team than the team concept itself. many people are allocated the leadership role who aren't suited to it or don't care.
people working on their own or at home pose increased risk in terms of productivity because lack of supervision can lead to distraction. with supervision there is a sense of belonging and pressure to perform. it has been my experience that while unrealistic pressure is counterproductive, people need realistic targets to aim for and measure their performance against. its possible to do this on your own; being your own boss requires this or you won't make yourself any money, but working on your own as a salary employee doesn't carry the same personal risk as someone who is self-employed, so any pressure that you impose on yourself is only superficial.
communication and teamwork are key attributes in most professional roles, so if you refuse to acknowledge their importance you are only severely limiting your own opportunities.
Re:It's worse in Academia (Score:4, Informative)
It's the same idea here: "productivity" shall be measured by the degree to which an individual exchanges information with other individuals, without anybody questioning whether that information is actually useful or productive. In contrast, look at the guy who solved Fermat's Theorem: from what I remember, he spent a couple decades hiding in his attic, everybody thinking he'd flamed out and turned into a recluse.
Andrew Wiles is his name, and he "only" spent 7 years on it. But indeed pretty much as an obsessive compulsive recluse. It's still amazing how such an easy theorem can require such an extrordinarily complex solution.
Ringelmann Effect (Score:5, Informative)
This is not new, it has been discovered in 1913, by a french agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect [wikipedia.org]
Various groups of people had to pull ropes, and Ringelmann discovered that people unconsciously reduced their effort when they were in a group, even when everybody except one in the group faked the rope-pulling !
The two biggest problems of collaborative work are:
1) communicating takes time, and you cannot work during this time
2) people provide less effort when they work collaboratively
Of course, there are a lot of advantages !
This is also related to social loafing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_loafing [wikipedia.org]
and it has interesting challenges, like raising funds for Wikipedia.
About creativity, I think that innovation is not a solitary activity.
You need to interact to get ideas, and the more you learn about diverse subjects, the more you can be creative. This is why people like Leonardo da Vinci were able to invent so much: they had a large knowledge across a lot of domains. Nowadays, it's difficult to have such a broad knowledge, because we need to concentrate on a few domains. This is why group brainstorming is efficient: people with different views and approaches work on a common problem by sharing their knowledge.
What hurts creativity the most is not group brainstorming, it's the fact that people don't want to challenge themselves. This is called mental fixedness. Now, everybody concentrates on improving current ideas, not challenging them or creating new ones. New ideas emerge only when you are unsatisfied with the current ideas.
On a personal note, I was an introvert 3 years ago, and I was a very good coder. Since 3 years, I'm now an extrovert, and even though my social skills increased tremendously, I don't enjoy coding anymore. I still enjoy solitary activities, like writing for my blog, but I'm not interested into pure logic anymore.
I believe that logic and introversion are related. I consider myself as a creative guy, and my creativity which was used for writing code is now used on social interactions.
Re:Not sure about this one. (Score:4, Informative)