What Is the Happiest Personality? (It Actually Might Be Yours)

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0:00This isn't a running ad from REI, because it's mostly walking, and occasionally flying.

0:09It's hitting your favorite trail with your favorite people, who showed up for the same unhinged reason. And it's not just about fastest known times, but finding the funnest times. Because this isn't running, it's trail running. Get your gear for the trail in store, or at REI.com. I want to talk today about personality, and how personality affects happiness. Specifically, I want to talk about one aspect of personality, extroversion. How extroversion versus introversion affects happiness.

0:41Extroverts are not a lot happier. Extroverts are a little happier, on average. Not only do they have more intense periods of well-being, but their general well-being is punctuated by frequent moments of joy. And so I want to talk about why that is. How can introverts, as introverts, be happier people? And then, what can extroverts learn from introverts? Because it turns out that there are some very important things that they can learn that can lead to a lot greater happiness for everybody.

Welcome to Office Hours

1:11Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness, how you can live a better life using science and ideas. And that's my mission in life. Thank you for joining me in that mission, for learning these ideas to give yourself a better life, but also to teach these ideas to other people. We are a movement of happiness teachers, based not just on woo-woo, really based on the best science that's available,

1:42the best that's been written and thought by academics and sensible people all over the world, which I know includes you. I'm grateful to you for joining me on this journey. Before we get started, I would like to ask you for one favor. Please subscribe to this YouTube channel and to this show, such that you can have these episodes delivered to you directly. Most of the people who actually see this show aren't subscribed, strangely. And so that's an efficient way to do it. It also helps us in the algorithm so that we can reach more people. The algorithm will say, who's like the person who just subscribed?

2:14And it will show up in their algorithm so that they can benefit from this information as well. So thank you very much for that. One more thing. If you have anything to tell us to improve the show, to suggest topics, we're more than a year in at this point, and we need ideas. We want ideas. We want to know what's most on your mind. And please let us know. You can write to the show itself, officehours at arthurbrooks.com. That's the email address. Or leave it in the comments, wherever you're watching or listening to this, on Spotify or YouTube or Apple Podcasts.

2:45And also, while you're there, leave a rating for us. Once again, it helps the algorithm. It helps us understand what's working better for you and what's maybe not working so well. We want to have a process of continuous improvement for your happiness and for the show's success. If you want more information like this, subscribe to the newsletter. The newsletter that accompanies the show, it's not always on the same topic. It's 300 to 500 words a week, comes every Friday morning, and it's completely free. Go to my website at arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. And last but not least, if you're interested in meeting other people in person,

3:18retreats on these particular subjects. We have a series of retreats based on all of this material, some of which I'm involved with and some of which I'm not in person. But you can find out more about that in a very, very beautiful place in Santa Fe, New Mexico of all sites. What better place to think about love and happiness? Go to retreats.arthurbrooks.com.

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Personality and happiness

4:37What are we talking about today? I want to talk today about personality and how personality affects happiness. Specifically, I want to talk about one aspect of personality, extroversion. How extroversion versus introversion affects happiness. Whether or not there are things that extroverts and introverts can learn from each other. And my answer to cut to the chase is, yeah, they absolutely can. I'm going to talk to you about what gives the greatest tendency toward happiness, but why that's not a set thing. On the contrary, when we learn from each other, for the great gifts that extroverts and introverts

5:09uniquely bring, when we can adopt, no matter who you are, adopt the other styles approach to life, your life can get a lot better. And it gives me an opportunity to talk about this fascinating field of personality science. There are many personality psychologists out there, and I want to give you a little glimpse into their work. This is something that I like to talk about an awful lot. I think you'll find it interesting. And if you find it interesting enough, I'll know because of what you leave in the comments, and I will do whole shows about each aspect of personality going forward. It's really up to you. Now, some time ago, a friend of mine who also does a lot of work on mass education around

5:46social science, he's not an academic like me. He's actually a journalist. He's a columnist for many years, but he's very interested in how social science and behavioral science can be used in the public interest. And he sent me a link to a survey based on academic research that rates personality traits on a numeric scale. They might think, that seems so subjective. How can you rank personality traits? Well, it turns out people have been doing that for a very long time. More on that in a second. What he was most keen to know was my extroversion score, where extroversion is one element of somebody's

6:19personality. He wanted to see if the test was accurate, because he had just taken it. He had scored at the 15th percentile for extroversion. That meant he's an introvert, obviously. So extroversion 0 to 100, 15th percentile means that you're at the lower end, and that means you're more introverted than extroverted, because they're opposite constructs in this particular scale. He wanted to know if that was accurate by having me take it as well as the most extroverted person that he knew. Like, it's kind of a dubious distinction. It's not a flex, my friends, even if it is a fact.

6:52If you want to know about how to look at the markers and the percentages and the metrics on this, I'll throw something into the show notes. This is an article from Psychological Assessment from Lewis Goldberg from 1992. This is a classic article called The Development of Markers for the Big Five Factor Structure. In other words, it's how can you numerically measure personality if you're interested in that. So I took the test, and sure enough, I scored the 96th percentile, which means that some

7:23freakish 4% of the population is actually more extroverted than me. But that kind of makes sense. I know I'm a very extroverted guy. When I was a kid, for example, you know, we had both extroverts and introverts in my family. We were a family of four, me and my brother and my parents. And my dad and my brother were less extroverted. My mother and I were more extroverted. And I remember when my brother and I were sitting in the backseat of the car, and my brother was talking to my dad, and my dad would say, I can't hear you. And when I was talking, he said, keep your voice down. And that's a classic kind of way that little kids will express their extroversion or introversion

7:57with respect to the timbre and tone and volume of their voices. Anyway, so I get back that 96th percentile, and I send it to my friend in the 15th percentile. He says, yep, I know it's accurate now. But then he said something else. It really struck me. He said, lucky you. I said, why? Why lucky me? And he said, because extroverts are a lot happier than introverts. Well, he was kind of right, it turns out. Extroverts are not a lot happier. Extroverts are a little happier on average. Decades of research have shown that extroverts have a significant, by that I mean statistically

8:31significant, not a large happiness edge, but one that does show up in the data consistently over introverts. Not only do they have sort of more intense periods of well-being, but their general well-being is punctuated by frequent moments of joy. And so I want to talk about why that is. But I also want to talk about the cases in which introverts can be happier than extroverts and what both can learn from each other. It's not a huge difference. And so if you're watching this and you're an introvert, I'm not dumping on introverts.

9:02On the contrary, I'm going to talk about ways that they have very, very special gifts, which when developed properly can give them a happiness edge. And ways in which in my own family, I've learned from introverts. That has given me a lot more happiness than I otherwise always would have had. And I want to talk about what to know about personality science in general. What can you actually use? Now, here's the point. People often think my personality is my personality. It is what it is. Yeah, you have a genetic baseline for sure.

9:33I mean, almost all of the identical twin studies where identical twins through a series of weird circumstances, these were not evil experiments. They just kind of happened naturally, were separated at birth and adopted into separate families and then reunited as adults and given personality tests. Because if you get a bunch of 40-year-olds who didn't know they had identical twins altogether, you're going to have nerds like me with white lab coats and clipboards following them around, asking them questions. Trust me. This is a near ideal set of quasi-experimental circumstances to get a whole bunch of data.

10:05And so sure enough, I mean, I've never actually directly participated in these things because these things were done a long time ago. But what they found was that between 40% and 80% of the variance in people's personalities is explained by genetics. Okay, so that's a lot, right? That really, that is significant and that includes extroversion. So I want to talk about that a little bit, but I also want to make the case, and the reason I'm doing this episode is because you can change your personality or at least you can intervene in your personality with your behavior. If it's 40% to 80% that, you know, that's the variance is explained by genetics, that means

10:41there's, there's 20 to, you know, 20 to 60% that's not. And that means you've got significant control over the expression of your genes, the expression of your personality, even if it does have this big genetic component. So how do you do that? That's what I really want to talk about. And how can you do it in such a way that you actually get happier?

The five-factor personality model

10:59Okay, let's back up a little bit and talk about this fascinating field of personality per se. We always use the word, you know, my personality, your personality. I don't like her personality. I think he's got a beautiful personality, whatever it happens to be. What do we mean by that? And that gets us back to the work, believe it or not, of Carl Jung. Almost everybody who's watching this knows the work of Carl Jung. You wouldn't be a follower of Office Hours if you didn't know some of the, you know, some of the, the, the goats in, in our field. And Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, student colleague of Sigmund Freud, who later broke with

11:33Freud because he thought that Freud's, many of his theories were, were, were, um, unfounded or at least, uh, he didn't go far enough in directions that he wanted to go. Carl Jung was one of the first people to study the whole concept of the unique personality that people have. And this is the early part of the 20th century. So it's not that old. It's only a little over a hundred years ago that people really started talking about the personality of human beings like we do. And by the way, we even use that, the concept of personality when we talk about our dogs or horses, or, you know, my cat has a funny personality.

12:05That's a very anthropomorphic idea. And yet it's real. You can tell the difference between two dogs' personalities. And there are people who do sort of animal psychology who try to measure that. Not nearly as much as people. We're going to talk about people here, not about dogs. I love dogs. They're the best people, but you get my point. But Jung, the way he waded into this concept was really that first aspect of personality, which is extroversion versus introversion. He was the one who first really talked about introverts and extroverts as this binary kind

12:36of switch that people have. He's the author of that very concept and those words, they were first popularized by him in 1921, as a matter of fact. And, you know, he talked about it in a way that, you know, introverts, they seek to establish autonomy and independence. Extroverts, they're not so keen on those things. They're not trying to establish autonomy and independence. What they're trying to do is to establish community and reach out all the time. And their sources of happiness are fundamentally different.

13:09Extroverts seek to seek union with others. And there's a whole lot written about that. But let me expand the concept of personality a little bit to how it developed over the next few decades. Personality, as we came to understand it a little bit later, largely through the work of the German psychologist Hans Eysenck, expanded from introversion and extroversion to a five-factor model. We, as human beings, and I've talked about it very briefly on the show before, so you

13:40might remember me referring to these ideas in the past, that the human personality has five elements to it that we can measure. And there's a whole series of statistical methods to actually do this. This wasn't just made up by some self-improvement author. This is largely a method that comes from something called factor analysis or principal components analysis. A statistical technique in which you take up a huge battery of questions and you let the data decide what the individual elements that are popping out of the answers to the

14:11questions actually are. So you can Google it if you want, factor analysis, and you can learn more or less how it works. But it's a very robust technique for figuring out what the elements of something actually are statistically. What they found is that the human personality has five dimensions to it. Now, this can be easily remembered using the acronym OCEAN. Okay, O-C-E-A-N. Because each one of the elements starts with one of those letters. Obviously, that's how acronyms work. The O is openness to experience. This is a very distinct personality characteristic. Some people, it's like, don't give me anything new.

14:43They want to go to the beach every year on vacation. They want to watch the same shows on television. When they go to their favorite restaurant, they always order the same dish. You know, they like to go to bed at the same time every night. They like to see their friends. They're not super open to these new kinds of experiences. These are the people, you go to them and you say, what do you say? Let's try skydiving. They're like, what are you, crazy? Why would I even want to do that? Like, I've got my routines. I've got the things that I actually like. Other people are just, they're junkies for new experiences. They love the newness.

15:14They have what many psychologists would call neophilia. The love of new things. They like, you know, new kinds of art and feeling new ways. Now, neophilics, they, they, it's, it's great, right? I mean, it's great. It's the spice of life, but also it has a downside. Neophilics, they tend to experiment with drugs and alcohol. They tend to have more sexual partners. You get the point and which can lead to all sorts of trouble in their lives. So, you know, everything has got a good side to bad side is what it comes down to. But that's number one is openness to experience as a personality dimension.

15:47That's the O. C is conscientiousness. Conscientiousness. Conscientious people live up to their word. If they, their word is their bond, as they say these days. And, and conscientious people, while they tend to be older, one of the things about personality that's most interesting is how it changes. And people get more conscientious as they age. One of the reasons for this is that they realize that being not conscientious, being unreliable, for example, that that actually is bad for them. People don't like hanging out with non-conscientious people.

16:18People who don't show up when they say they're going to show up. People who don't do what they say they're going to do. And so they actually become more conscientious as a matter of living a better life, but also because they want to be better people. Now, some people are just naturally more conscientious than others. It's about 50% explained genetically. And, and, and you know, people like that, even little kids who are just always can count on them. They're just conscientious people. Three are the third one. The E is extroversion. That's the one that we've been talking about. And, and I, introversion doesn't get its own letter because it's the opposite of extroversion

16:50in this particular construct and the way that we're talking about it. Extroversion is this idea of wanting to be in union with others, being highly social. Extroversion has, has two sub elements to it. Two sub particles. You could say they're gregariousness and assertiveness. To be extroverted means you're gregarious. You're super outgoing. You want to be with people, but you're also say what you think. That's the difference between gregariousness and assertiveness. And here's the interesting thing. As people get older, one of them actually declines and the other increases.

17:22So gregariousness tends to fall as people get into their fifties and sixties and especially seventies and eighties. They become less likely to want to go to that party and stay out late. You know, they're more likely to say, what time is it over? I don't think I'm going, but they tend to become more assertive. But, you know, I'll tell you, I'm 62 years old and when I was 32, I, you know, they gave me French fries instead of mashed potatoes, um, accidentally in the restaurant. I'd be like, okay. And now I'm like, life is short. I asked for mashed potatoes. I'm not going to be a jerk about it because I'm trying to, you know, get the next element

17:55of personality I'll tell you about as I get older, but it's, I am more assertive than I certainly was in the past. So gregariousness as an aspect of extroversion tends to go down as you get older and assertiveness tends to go up. That's E. A is agreeableness. That's the one that I really want to, I want to have higher. That's one of the reasons that when I send my, my French fries back, I'm not being a jerk about it because I want to be agreeable in no small part because I've learned through bitter experience in my life that when I'm disagreeable, I don't get what I want, right?

18:28I try to be more agreeable with my family. I try to be more agreeable with my friends and certainly more agreeable with service personnel in my life. Also, I want to be a good person because I, through conscientiousness, I want to be more agreeable, but I've also figured out that that's an effective strategy for leading a better life. Agreeableness does tend to rise as you age and agreeableness is just what it sounds like. It's somebody, you don't agree on everything, but you're, you're not disagreeable when you disagree is what it comes down to. A lot in there, but you get my point. That's A. Last but not least is N.

18:58And N is a tricky one because that's neuroticism. That's a very Freudian term to be neurotic. Largely what it means today is to suffer from mood disorders, either subclinically or clinically. The mood disorders we'd largely talk about are generalized anxiety and depression. You know, sort of melancholy is what Sigmund Freud would have talked about it, how he would have talked about it. And, and of course, these are big, these are a big deal today. Since 2008 or so, clinical depression, particularly among people under 35 has tripled.

19:30Generalized anxiety has doubled. I mean, these are the scourge of our times. And if you've been listening to my show, you know exactly how I talk about this. The truth is that we use our brains wrong, largely with the interface of technology into our lives. I'm very, very glad that you're watching or you're listening to this podcast right now, but you need plenty of time in your life when you're not watching this or listening to podcasts and certainly not letting the algorithms just feed you stuff all the time, especially shorts. What that does is it makes you, your brain work in such a way that you, you don't even assess or think about questions of meaning in your life.

20:01And that tends to make you more depressed, anxious, and lonely. So neuroticism, which has always existed, there have always been people who are anxious and depressed, is something that, that is dramatically deleterious for human happiness and wellbeing, life satisfaction, obviously, but they're increasing. People are becoming more neurotic. And there's a ton of interesting studies on this that show that people under 35 have become significantly higher on the neuroticism, on the end dimension of the big five factor personality traits than they've been in the past.

20:33This especially exploded, not just after 2008, but during COVID, which compounded all the problems through loneliness and isolation for everybody, by the way, for people my age, but also if you're in your twenties, for people your age, the problem is that for people in their twenties, it didn't snap back. Whereas for people my age, it did. Neuroticism came back to its baseline largely, and it didn't for people who are younger. So this is a significant area of concern and something that I'm looking at a lot, as are a lot of behavioral scientists, because we want to make this better. Okay. So those are the personality dimensions.

21:04I'll put a, I'll put a link to the Jung 1921 research in there, in case you're looking at it. And once again, the article that I referred to before by Lewis Goldberg, the classic 1992 article on the personality dimensions, that's already in the show notes. So you can read more about that. Now, the person who really popularized these in the 1960s was that German psychologist, Hans Isink, that I talked about before. And Hans Isink was, as he developed this five-factor model, he strongly believed that there was

21:35kind of a neuroscientific dimension. There's a neurobiological reason for all of this stuff, which kind of makes sense, given the fact that we found that, you know, that these aspects are explained at about, you know, the 40 to 80% level by genetics. The difference between people is explained a lot by genetics. So you'd think that there'd be a structural explanation that we'd be able to find in the brain. And Isink believed very strongly that, for example, in the case of extroversion, which we're focusing on here, it came from cortical arousal. That is the brain's level of alertness. Some people just genetically have, you know, a higher level of alertness.

22:09And furthermore, he found that it was harder for some people to maintain cortical arousal, sufficient to be successful than others. Some people, they were just not naturally that alert. And here's the interesting part. He believed that extroverts tended to be low in cortical arousal. They tended to be less alert. That's the opposite of what I presume you thought I was going to say, but it's going to make sense in a second. He thought that maintaining a level of sufficient, sufficiently high level of alertness to function

22:40properly was more difficult for extroverts than introverts. So extroverts have to seek the stimulation from others. That introverts have an endogenous alertness. So they don't need to be talking to other people all the time and interacting with people so much. Whereas extroverts are not as alert as much. That cortical arousal is actually inhibiting their performances. So they actually need to get more alertness. And the way that they do that is by interacting more with others. That was Isink's observation based on data. And it has some empirical backing, as a matter of fact.

23:13Furthermore, he believed that extroverts tend to be more reward focused, especially when it comes to social stimulation. Whereas introverts tend to rely more on internal processing and reflection. Those are two ideas that are obviously pretty similar. I'll put Isink's 1960s research in here on intelligence assessment, et cetera. And also just how more recent work has evaluated the legitimacy of this research. Mitchell and Kumari, 2016, about Hans Isink's interface between the brain and personality,

23:45modern evidence from cognitive neuroscience. That's in Personality to Individual Differences, which is a great journal, highly reputable. I'll put in a couple of more references on that if you're interested in that. I know some of you really are.

Why extroverts are happier

23:56Okay, so what about happiness? Okay, so that explains, you know, why some people, it potentially explains why some people are just more extroverted than others. But what about the fact that we find in the research that extroverts tend to have a happiness edge? Why do they tend to be a little bit happier? This kind of blends together a bunch of psychological theories. But here's the typical explanation for why that is the case. Humans, we know, are inherently social animals. And you've heard me go on and on about the fact that we are a hierarchical kin-based pack

24:27tropical species. Homo sapiens are. And our brains are suited to live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals that have to be really together to survive, to pass on our genes and to survive. We have to know our kin and be close to our kin and be highly social with our kin. So we're like wolves in this way. We're like many, many other pack animals. We have to be together. So that being the case, that we are inherently social animals, and that contact actually gives us a sense of satisfaction, extroverts who seek out contact to get this cortical stimulation,

25:02they're going to be happier as a result of doing this thing. We're highly rewarded for being social. We get a happiness reward for being social. Okay, part one. Part two, extroverts look for the stimulus because their brain needs it. Ergo, when they try to go get that thing that their brain needs, they get happier naturally. That's the whole idea. They're social. Being social makes you happy. Extroverts love people. And so by doing what they naturally want to do, they become happier than introverts.

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26:38The fact that introverts prefer solitude and struggle with sociability doesn't mean that

Culture and introversion advantages

26:44avoiding contact makes them happier. And this is an interesting thing. So, you might say, okay, so extroverts, they're happier because they're in contact with others. So, therefore, introverts must be happier when they're not in contact with others. This is absolutely the case. And this is the argument that psychologists have always made, that being an introvert and avoiding people is an example of meeting a need, but that that need not bringing you happiness. We do this all the time. We do all kinds of things here that meet a need in our life or a perceived need in our

27:14life that actually make us less happy. Because once again, Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Like, we have to be responsible for that, not just following our animal impulses. All right, now there are other reasons, more contemporary reasons than all of this. I mean, I realize that some of that was relatively esoteric, but there are other more common sense reasons why you would find in the literature that natural extroverts tend to be a little bit happier than natural introverts. To begin with, extroversion in American society in particular is hugely rewarded. Much, much less so in other societies, by the way.

27:45In East Asia, for example, American-style extroversion is considered to be really weird. And it makes people extremely uncomfortable, as a matter of fact. I mean, if you go out to dinner with a bunch of your friends in East Asia, and you start talking about, you know, personal issues in your life, it's not going to be rewarded. That's more of an American thing. It's also more of a Latin American thing. I spend a lot of time, as some of you know, in Spain, because my wife is Spanish, and so we've lived off and on in Barcelona for the past 35 years.

28:15And when we're there, I mean, it's like, it's extroversion. It's like 10, whereas it's less than that in the United States. Relatively speaking, it's a far more extroverted place. And the result is that you can have conversations that you never would. I mean, I recounted in one of my columns some time ago about a wonderful dinner that my wife and I had with complete strangers in Madrid last year. And within 15 minutes, the hostess at this dinner of eight couples, we didn't know them. And she said, you know, I meant to ask all of you, what's the closest you all came to getting a divorce?

28:51And it's like, strangers. Gulp. I mean, that would make people uncomfortable in the United States. It would make people, you know, run screaming from the room in Japan, probably. But in Spain, it's like, ah, interesting conversation. Go deeper, go home, man. And that's based on this naturally highly extroverted culture. In the United States, it's rewarded not just socially, it's rewarded economically. Extroverts make a lot more money. There's an interesting study that shows that extroverts make about $12,000 more per year than introverts, which at the general level is like, that's no joke.

29:21When the average family of four in the United States makes about $75,000 a year, that's very significant. That's almost a 20% differential in what the average family is going to make. As a matter of fact, they also extroverts, they tend to attain other advantages in the workplace, such as promotions to leadership positions and high performance evaluations. And there's a ton of studies on that. There's one from the Journal of Applied Psychology I'll put in the notes called Extroversion Advantages at Work, a Quantitative Review and Synthesis of the Meta-Analytic Evidence. Yeah, you got to see this because, you know, it turns out that we really rewarded.

29:53Now, I've seen it over the course of my career, not in my case, but, you know, I've taught in business schools for a long time. I go back teaching at business schools for 30 years. And business schools, they love extroverts. I mean, you know, I've taught classes where the grading criteria involved class participation up to 50% of the grade. I've seen classes that are 70% of the grade are class participation. And that's just like a root canal for introverts, putting your hand up and just going blah,

30:24blah, blah, blah, for the sake of the blah, blah, blah, because you want to get your grade up. Now, when I taught my classes, I tried very, despite my extroversion, because I'd be the guy like this all the time, again, not a flex, but I didn't want to reward that in the same way because, you know, being a behavioral scientist, I got the data. I don't want to unduly penalize people who just happen to be natural introverts. So I would give them all different ways to participate. And I would make sure with my calling patterns for people who are not having their hands up that I would give them a particular opportunity at the beginning of class to get their comments

30:57in if they're getting counted. Right. But most professors don't do that. At business schools, it's like, wherever you got their hand up, gets called on, they get higher grades. This is an example of the advantages that we're actually talking about. So that, quite frankly, can be extremely unfair, but it's the law of the jungle. I mean, particularly when you're making your way into American culture. Very interesting book that talks about how unfair that is and how inefficient that is, is a very famous book. Maybe some of you already know about the wonderful author, Susan Cain, has the book Quiet, the

31:29power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking. You know, I know she's not big on extroverts like me. I get it. But it's a wonderful book and it's really worth reading because she talks about examples of many wonderful things that have been created by introverts and, you know, theory of gravity. You know, Isaac Newton was an introvert. Google was developed by introverts. And she argues that admiring and rewarding extroversion isn't just unfair, but it actually hinders progress. And so we should do something about that.

32:00It's actually, that book has been influential among readers. And it's been influential with me, too. I mean, one of the reasons that I watch my call patterns to not marginalize the introverts in my class is precisely because of Susan Cain's work and how important it is. So if you ever feel disillusioned in the United States or any other place about our habit of elevating egotistical and charismatic leaders, you'll probably admit that Susan Cain has a point and that it's not just unfair, but it's kind of unwise for us to be marginalizing introverts

32:31or not paying attention to them.

What introverts and extroverts learn

32:32Okay, let's get to the really applied part of how this all comes about. I hope you found this interesting, but I want you to be able to use this as well, whether you're an introvert or an extrovert. How can introverts increase their happiness? They're not going to change fundamentally their personalities. Now, some introverts are so skilled as thespians, like as actors, that they can put on extroversion all day long, but not when they come home. And one of the things that I talk about an awful lot is happiness in relationships and how one of the big barriers to happiness in relationships is for people who can't feel

33:05like they can be themselves with their partners. You have to have your personality. Now, again, work on your neuroticism. Don't dump the garbage on your partner when you come home every day with your sadness and anxiety. I mean, work to actually manage that, especially with the people that you love the most. But you have to have a baseline of who you are. Otherwise, you'll be uncomfortable and you'll never really be happy at home. How can introverts, as introverts, be happier people? And what can they learn from extroverts? And then what can extroverts learn from introverts?

33:35Because it turns out there are some very important things that they can learn that can lead to a lot greater happiness for everybody. Let's start with what introverts can learn from extroverts. Number one, introverts can get a lot happier, not just by, you know, going and talking to strangers, although there is literature on that. Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, a psychologist who does incredible work, has talked about the fact that when people talk to strangers, everybody gets happier. Now, that's brutal for introverts.

34:06For extroverts, they're like, yeah, no kidding. I've always done that. You sit down on a plane next to an extrovert, and you're like, so where are you from? And which might actually drive you crazy. What introverts can do, however, that isn't hard, is to focus more on the future, like extroverts do. Now, this is a tricky topic. Human beings have an incredible ability to travel time. There's three time zones inside your brain. They're called prospection, mindfulness, and retrospection. Retrospection, the last one, is thinking about the past.

34:37Mindfulness is thinking about right now, and prospection is thinking about the future. You're probably, anybody who's a fan of this show, knows about mindfulness meditation techniques. And what that is, is this observation that most homo sapiens, most of us, we don't spend enough time in the mindful present, and we kind of miss our lives. And there's all kinds of reasons that we should try to be more mindful. For example, philosophers and theologians have pointed out forever that you can only love in the present. You can't love in the future or love in the past.

35:08Loving happens right now. And if you want evidence of that, think about when you're with your beloved and when you're having the most intense experience of love. It's when you're sitting together locked in. It's not when you're sitting together thinking about tomorrow at work. And that's not when you're expressing or receiving love. It's when you're together and looking into each other's eyes and being present right now. And so presentism, mindfulness, is a very, very important skill. Now, that said, one of the things that we also know as an element of happiness is prospection

35:41to the extent that you always have something to look forward to. You have something that gives you a sense of anticipation. Why? Because purpose, which is an element of meaning in our lives, requires goals and direction and progress. Goals, direction, and progress. You want to be a happier person? You need goals. You need a direction in life. And you need to make progress toward those goals, following that direction. That's a really important part of meaning. And meaning is an incredibly unreplaceable element of happiness. That's one of the things that I write the most about, as a matter of fact. And so the result of it is that you need to have something that you can look forward to.

36:15You have to have something that is this goal. Don't be insane about it. Don't be super attached to it. But you have to have something that gives you a sense of anticipation of reward. Extroverts always do that. Extroverts are great about thinking about future rewards, which is one of the sources of their happiness. There's a 2001 study. That's a 25-year-old study now, believe it or not. Sorry to depress you. From Oxford University that broke a sample of survey respondents into four groups. All right, here are the four groups.

36:45Happy extroverts, unhappy extroverts, smaller group, happy introverts, and unhappy introverts. Okay, now what are they really, really interested in? They're interested in what drove the happy introverts into higher well-being. Because, you know, these are the out groups. I would also want to know why the extroverts were so unhappy in that group. But happy introverts, what were they doing differently than the unhappy introverts? That's what the scholars were really into. And they found that they were doing something that extroverts do naturally, which is that

37:17a sense of optimism, a sense of life purpose, a sense of direction, a sense of goals, a sense of progress. That article came out in Personality and Individual Differences, same journal I talked about a minute ago. It's called Happiness, Introversion, Extroversion, and Happy Introverts, in the show notes, of course. Now, extroverts do this naturally. They think about the future and they dream about the future naturally. They love to talk to people about their future. They talk about their dreams. They talk about life's purpose. They talk about it all the time. This is what I talk about with my kids a lot, not mine, theirs, because they've got a much

37:50bigger future than I do. We tend to act according to the commitments that we've articulated to others. And the result of it is that when extroverts, when they express their thoughts and hopes and dreams to others over the course of their extroversion and sociability, their gregariousness, that they tend to live according to these dreams. They tend to follow these goals. They tend to take that trajectory. And that's one of the secrets to their great happiness. What do happy introverts do?

38:20Here's the answer from that research. Happy introverts have figured out a way to envision the future without all of the uncomfortable personal sharing with other people. In other words, they envision the future. They think about the future such that they can, I guess, in the new age world, you'd say manifest that. I've written a lot about manifesting. It actually doesn't come from turning the gears in the universe that I'm aware of. What it does is it turns the gears in your head. It makes you behave a little bit differently subconsciously. So when introverts, not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah about their future to everybody,

38:52but when they think, think, think, think about their future, when they're more future oriented, without marginalizing the mindful present, when they do that, they tend to manifest that better future. And that's what makes them happier. There's another thing that introverts naturally do, which gets me to my second point on how extroverts can actually learn from introverts. There's one big skill that introverts have that extroverts don't, which is deep, deep, deep friendship with just a few people. Now, we have limited time and cognitive bandwidth in everything, in work, in play, in studying,

39:28in everything, and also in friendship. And so you can spread out the amount of friendship that you can cognitively manage among a few people or among a lot of people. And now I see this a lot with my students, and I even see this with my kids. Two of my kids are super extroverted, like me and my wife. So we're a family of dogs, but we have one daughter, our youngest child, and she's not a dog. She's a cat. She's one cat living with four dogs. And she talks hilariously about it because she's an introvert and we're all extroverts.

40:00And she's like, it's almost as if, here's her joke, it's almost as if we're not related, right? Because it turns out we're not genetically related. She's adopted. I mean, she's so one of us. And in so many ways, she understands me at such an unbelievably deep level. But the result is that we've come to appreciate her catness, and she's come to appreciate our dogginess in a lot of ways. She also calls us out when we're being too loud or obnoxious, to be sure. Keep it down in there, says my youngest daughter.

40:31But what she has an advantage of over the rest of us is that she's got usually a couple of really, really, really deep close friendships. She's good at deep friendship in a way that, you know, it's harder for me. Like, it's easier for me to be like, fresh meat, you know? It's easier for me to like, I want to be friends with everybody. And she doesn't, which means that she partitions her friendship time and effort and cognitive energy toward just a few people.

41:02And those are deep, intimate relationships that bring a huge amount of satisfaction. So who do they talk about their futures with, if not everybody who will listen? The answer is their few actual friends. They forge close friendships with people with whom they have nothing to gain as an intense source of their satisfaction. Okay, now that turns out to be hard for extroverts, because they want new, new, new, new. Their extroverts also tend to be highly open in experience, in appetite for experience. They tend to be neophilic.

41:32But when they actually will deepen their friendships and focus on fewer as opposed to more, extroverts can get a lot happier as well. So how do you do that? If you're an extrovert and don't know how to begin, you should just watch a happy introvert do it. You know, I learned to do that by actually watching my wife, and I'm a much better friend. And here's a side note before I get to a couple of things, a couple of pieces of homework that I want to give you. But beyond the specifics of introversion and extroversion, there's one important lesson

42:03in all this. Watching and learning from people very different from you is a great way to be happier. So what have I just told you? The introverts can get happier by watching extroverts and behaving like them, and extroverts can get even happier by looking at introverts and behaving like them. But that's just generally true across personality and across different aspects of human life. happiness actually will come to you when you embrace human diversity of all types and appreciate that diversity from culture to character, even to politics.

42:36As a matter of fact, one of the things is that's so threatening to so many people in modern life today is like, if you disagree with me, I'm not going to date you. I'm not going to hang out with you. If you voted for that guy, whoever that guy is, I'm not going to specify. It doesn't really matter. It means that you're morally reprobate. And what you find is when people relax that and say, I'm really, really interested in people who have the, what I consider to be extremely weird views, that they get much happier just by observing. Even if you don't take on these characteristics politically, I know you're not gonna, as

43:07somebody else, when you just observe it with an attitude of interest in the other person, you get much happier. The broad point is that observing other people non-judgmentally is one of the greatest happiness lessons that we can actually get for the happiest world. We're going to have cats and dogs, but cats need to watch the dogs and dogs need to watch the cats and we can learn from each other. Okay. Here's my challenge for the week ahead. Here's my happiness homework for you. Number one, if you're an introvert, okay, for the introverts who are watching the show, take time this week to call an old friend with whom you'd like to reestablish some contact.

43:41Right? Make a new friend. Again, I'm not going to ask you to call 50 friends. This one friend that you want to establish contact with, this will harness your natural one-on-one powers and introvert. And what I want you to do when you're talking to that friend is to say, I want to learn, you know, what's going on in your life. And I want to tell you what's going on in mine. And then talk about these hopes and dreams, establish a new relationship. In other words, this is a small act of extroversion within the context of your natural strengths.

44:12This is going to make you happier. That's your homework. Here's your homework. If you're an extrovert, I want you to focus on one friend in your life this week. I know you got a lot and you got a lot, a big circle. Schedule a coffee or a lunch or a dinner with her or him in a one-on-one setting. Don't invite anybody else. Just that one-on-one person. Put your phone away. I mean, literally wait, not even down on the table. So that you're completely undistracted from that particular person.

44:42And you're uninterrupted by this as really an exciting adventure. Okay? And do this bilateral, this dyadic experience. And what you're going to find is that that's going to give you an enormous amount of sort of depth and satisfaction that you don't get from the ordinary experiences of your life. But this is you practicing the power of introversion by focusing intently on one person at a time. So that's your homework if you're an extrovert. Okay? Try that. Write in the show notes.

45:13Tell me how it goes. If you'd like more on this, on personality in particular, let me know. I would love to talk about agreeableness or conscientiousness or openness to experience. I'll talk more about neuroticism. I'll talk about all of it. I think personality is absolutely fascinating. So if you do too, let me know and I'll do more episodes like this.

Listener questions on budgets and failure

45:31Let's do some questions before we finish. Sophia asks, she writes in through the email address, Does having a budget increase happiness while on vacation? I don't assume she means a budget of time. I assume she means a budget of money. Literally. Does having a budget or even being financially aware in general increase happiness? Okay. So there's been no studies that I'm aware of that talk about how constraining your budget on vacation and how it affects your happiness. My guess is that when you don't have enough money on vacation, it's not great. And that's probably pretty straightforward and maybe even trivial. But there are a couple of questions here that are really worth addressing.

46:05One of the things that we know is when people overspend on vacation, that's really bad. And one of the reasons is that getting behind the eight ball financially is horrible for your happiness. And it's especially bad. The worst possible thing that you can do is to borrow money to go on vacation. That, my friends, is regress with respect to happiness. Now, some of you will remember in episodes I've done in the past about how to use money to get happier. Buying stuff will not make you happier. Buying experiences with your family and friends, that's the vacation, will bring you happiness.

46:37Buying time and spending it with your family or friends, which you can be doing on vacation as well, will bring happiness. Giving your money away will bring happiness. And saving your money, getting ahead financially, will bring you happiness because it gives you the sense of purpose and progress and goals and direction and some of the stuff I've talked about here today, as a matter of fact. But, on the other hand, going backwards with respect to saving, aka borrowing, especially for consumption. I've got the data on this. This is not just conjecture. The data are very clear. Borrowing for consumption, including for vacation, will give you negative happiness, aka unhappiness.

47:13Don't do that. Okay, so if you're living within a budget, fine. If that's the way it has to be, okay. Don't break it. Because if you go into debt and you're running up your credit cards on vacation, you will have gone into the red numbers, not just financially, but with respect to your happiness as well. Second question here is from Anonymous at officehours at arthurbirgs.com. I struggle with my relationship, in my relationships, with failure. How can I keep trying despite feeling discouraged by it? I hear this a lot from people in their 20s, and I know people who are, you know, 25 years old who feel like they're a disaster with respect to relationships because nothing's ever worked out.

47:50Well, you're 25! Okay, easy for me to say at 62, but I say that with appropriate humility. If you've had a few relationships not work out, I get it. You're going to start to wonder, is it ever going to happen for me? Let me give you one statistic. The average person, before they find their soulmate, before they find the person that they're going to marry, they have five heartbreaks. That's the average. Your results may vary. You know, one of my kids fell in love for the first time and got engaged and got married, has an incredibly happy marriage, has kids.

48:21Good. Your number comes up. There are entrepreneurs who do their first startup, and boom, it goes to IPO in five years, and they're billionaires. You know, my son's a billionaire in love and happiness on his first try. It's great. I mean, it's actually because his wife is so awesome. But, you know, other people, typically, they don't have that experience. Some people, you know, the average is five, meaning that there are people in the other tail who are like 10. But that doesn't mean that they're a failure. On the contrary. You know, the same thing is true with startup businesses. This is a startup life. Your romance is the startup of your life, and it requires reps, and it requires experience, and failure is generative in this particular way.

48:58The average startup entrepreneur in business has 3.8 failures, almost four failures, has four things that didn't work out before something it actually does, and they learn from each one of those. So the cycle is basically this. Try, fail, suffer, recover. Try, fail, suffer, recover. I get it. You will heal. I mean, I've done a lot of work on heartbreak. I know the timing and, you know, how, actually, how grief works. I even know the part of the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that is actually highly active when you're in the middle of a breakup.

49:31I get it. Brutal. Supposed to be brutal. But if you're having failure in your relationships, it means you're out there, and it means you're actually trying, and that's good. It's not evidence of you're doing something wrong. It's probably evidence that you're doing something right. Now, you can always get better at it. You can always be better at relationships. But that's the point of actually going through the cycle, is getting better and learning from what went wrong the last time and making sure you don't choose the same wrong person over and over and over again. So Anonymous, I struggle with relationships being a failure, you say.

50:02Yeah, you and a lot of other people stay in it. The fact that you're writing this and continuing to struggle with that is evidence that I strongly believe and I predict that permanent love is coming your way. Well, we're done, my friends. Let me know your thoughts by writing to me on the website at officehours at arthurburks.com. Leave comments, criticisms, any place you're watching or listening to this. We read them all, and we love them. Like and subscribe. Please hit the subscribe and like buttons on Spotify, YouTube, Apple.

50:34Follow me on Instagram, on the social media platforms. I know social media has so many things that we don't like about it, but it can be good for learning, and that's exactly what I'm trying to do with mine. Like Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, wherever your thing is, I'm probably there. If you're interested in these topics and many more, please get my latest book, The Meaning of Your Life. It's still pretty new. It came out the end of March, and it's still selling a lot of copies. It's also now in, I think, 20 languages. We get a couple new languages every month. And I would love to hear what you've got to say about that as well.

51:07I hope you have a wonderful week, my friends. I'm looking forward to seeing you next week. Thank you for tuning in. Go love other people in your own way, whether you're an extrovert or an introvert. That's what makes the world a better place. See you soon.

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