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Introversion and Solitude Increase Productivity
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.'"
Being alone doesn't mean I'm more productive -- it could mean I'm spending all day posting on Slashdot.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Mihaly has written a good book on the concept of flow, called "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.". Well worth the read imho.
That all describes me, except for the "spectacularly" verbiage.
Better known as 318230.
Reality check for all the morons who want to turn their office into a fun house.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
My home office is my 'Fortress of Solitude', safe from distraction of the outside world, incubator of ideas, and infused with the essence of coffee. Now if only I could stop checking Slashdot every fifteen minutes I might get some work done.
There has to be a balance between one's teamwork and individual creativity.
On the one hand, you can have prima donnas running the whole show, doing really great things that have absolutely nothing to do with actually getting a product out the door.
On the other hand, you can take extreme programming to the extreme, piss of your rock stars, and wind up with them quitting, and get trainwreck product.
Bottom line is that any team management approach needs to be able to milk everyone for the best they've got without stiffing creativity, or putting the wrong people at the helm for the sake alone of giving them a chance to drive.
Just some random thoughts as I sit alone blasting out my Saturday code...
Check your premises.
I recently finished a couple of years of working remotely from home instead of going into an office. I think it was some of the most productive work I've done. I collaborated with other engineers using Jabber, phone, and NetMeeting when needed but otherwise was able to work without interruption (kids are grown and moved out). Not commuting means I also worked longer hours. Yet my new job requires me to commute and be an Office Space drone. Why?
Our agile internet startup requires communication and collaboration between coworkers. You can't get that if everyone is holed up in their office. Now if you'll excuse me I have to update Pivotal Tracker and our Wiki.
AC :ac@gmale.com
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My recluse-like existence and stolid determination to keep the balance of my communications with The Others in strictly anonymous, online communication mediums doesn't mean I'm a wierdo, it means I'm a genius!
It's 1-0 for me, court-appointed psychologist!
Job offers invariably require applicants to "work well with others" and "enjoy team work". I don't like team work, and I work well with others if I have to, but it's not natural to me.
Well guess what: at each and every job interview I've been to, I lied and pretended I enjoyed working with others, when in reality I like being left the fuck alone to do a good job. Same thing on my resume: if you believe what I put in it, you'd think I'm a social monster. All the folks I know who are a bit of an introvert like I am similariy bullshit their way through job interviews.
Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they carry on asking those "skills"?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I work best alone when I'm trying to solve a problem that I'm really passionate about. Sadly a lot of times that doesn't describe what I get paid for, and in those cases having a group around me helps to stay on task. if I'm alone, I'm fighting against myself the whole time to stay focused and not work on what I think is interesting.
One reasons I chose IT was to be able to avoid large groups of people. I have had the unfortunate experience of cube hell like most techies, but all in all, I have had the ability to work alone for much of my almost 15 year IT tenure. I absolutely love working alone.
One of the reasons I hate group projects is because once I know what needs to be done, I just want to get to work. Other people want to talk and swap ideas. Like a lot of people, I just have a sense of what needs doing and I do it. I want to sink or swim on my own, not sink or swim because of someone else. I don't mind sharing ideas, but I despise "groupthink", "hive mind", whatever you want to call it. God gave me a brain and I know how to use it.
in my organization, because meetings are a part of the culture, and in meetings, the loudest voice dominates. Bullys aren't just in the playground, you know. I much prefer electronic collaboration (the article notes that this works better), it provides a level playing field for the soft, introverted voice.
The introverts were inevitably the most productive, yet ultimately bad for business. If you let them run ahead on applications, you end up being one deep in an app and that gives one person an unhealthy amount of power in the workplace.
In extreme cases I've seen the lone wolf carve out a place for himself and demand more money after squeezing out other staff. That's when it becomes a detriment to the company.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Well.... maybe because putting this on your resume doesn't look so good:
- Capable of refraining from telling co-workers that they're fucking inbred morons who would benefit from a course in remedial keyboarding, and that if they ever check in shit like that again that they'll discover that it is, in fact, possible to insert a 23 inch monitor into an arbitrary orifices.
Check your premises.
Solitude increases your productivity if you have the personality type that needs it. Otherwise it might have the opposite effect. Even if your prefer long blocks of solitude, you probably still need some input from others. I've seen this in my own life. Yes, I like a good solid block of time. OTOH, if I don't have somebody else that needs what I produce during those times then my work stagnates or goes off in directions that are less productive. That's not to say I can't do anyting purely for the desire of creating it. It's just that it's less efficient.
There's a bit more of the "wolf pack" in some of us geeks than we'd like to admit. Take away the pack, and the lone wolf sorta dies... usually. There are exceptions; but they're rare. Even Isaac Newton who was famously reluctant to reveal his work corresponded with Leibnitz.
And other socially repulsive habits. Your problems interacting with other people will go away.
Deleted
The problem wasn't that you put that on your resume. It's that when we checked your references we found out you were demonstrably _not_ capable of so refraining.
I work best when not bothered. I don't work in IT, but if I'm doing anything from actual work to tinkering in the garage, I like to be alone. For my personal life, though, I'm definitely a extrovert. I love being out and about with new people, living it up. I'm not shy.
Too much of either and I'm unhappy.
Gone!
There is a very good reason for our team to generally favor using our internal IM server even to the co-worker sitting next to you. Coding is creative, and an IM is much less interruptive than someone walking over to your desk and demanding your attention right now.
(Hint: Disable audio notifications.)
.: Max Romantschuk
Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they carry on asking those "skills"?
You told two people you're a people person. Then they told two people they were people persons. And so on, and so on, and so on...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You forget another, more glamorous possibility: I would very much enjoy putting "capable of concentrating long and hard on any problem, able to work on my own at a problem until it's fully and properly solved" in my resume. In this day and age, where most people seem to glorify short attention spans and teamwork (which is usually just a way dividing the individual brainpower required to perform a certain task, and diluting responsibility when things go wrong), this would seem like a worthwhile skill to offer to an employer.
But no, if you don't pretend you like teamwork and you work well with others in your resume, you can be sure it'll be chucked out in the trashcan right off the bat. It's almost automatic, so much so that it's almost impossible to find a resume *without* that line.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Otherwise, a couple more years pretending to "enjoy team work" and you'll be up on a water tower with an AW50 taking pot shots at former "team" mates.
Deleted
Public schools always cater to the lowest common denominator. They are more a tool for socialization than education, readying a workforce for a life of 9 to 5 conformity. I don't recall innovative thought being rewarded in school. Memorization, maybe.
Thus, the movement for home schooling. [http://www.nationalhomeschool.com/socialization.asp]
Most teachers don't want or have time to teach each child as an individual. It's not their fault. Grading and assessment alone would overwhelm them. Finding the material to challenge each student's ability individually would be impossible with given resources and mindset.
It is a tribute to our children's tenacity that so many succeed despite the public school system.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
Social groups deter any kind of radical thought or behavior. That's the groupthink phenomenon. The larger the group, the stronger the effect. That's why creativity never thrives in large organizations, and that's the reason the most creative social construct is the single person who does not need to compromise his or her ideas for the harmony of the group.
I roll my eyes every time I hear an organization of thousands of people is proclaiming it fosters innovation (or diversity, but that's another story).
Good ideas come from brainstorming, but working out HOW to implement those ideas requires quiet thought.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
...there must be a lot of productive people here on Slashdot.
People need to understand what being Introvert actually means. Being social or easily small-talking doesn't make someone extrovert, and you can't be 'extrovert' for this and that but 'introvert' for these. It just doesn't work that way. Introversion is taking energy in mentally from being alone and being exhausted mentally by exposure to groups for a while. Extroversion is taking energy in from social interactions while being depleted when alone. You wouldn't have to be a genius then to come to Susan Cain's conclusion.
In Capitalist US, the commerce controls the Government.
Multiple studies, at least within the context of software development, seem to be in conflict:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/12/001206144705.htm
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
My job about a year ago switched from full height cubes to 1/3rd height cubes where even when sitting you can see everybody and everything. The thought was that it would increase group thinking and productivity as you would be able to communicate with more people in a "group" setting while still being at your own work station.
In reality noise went up greatly, productivity went down greatly and communication consist of mindless jabber and gossip. It's fun for about half an hour until you realise that you have deadlines and metrics to meet. No I need to put on a good pair of isolating headphone just to get the same amount of productivity as I was able to before with "trips to others cubes"
Not to mention the fact that HR is typically where the first few rounds of screening go and they're precisely the sorts of people that engage in those sorts of behaviors.
Is there any research (after all, we are talking science) to support this? Forget solitude and playing games, I know for myself if I sit quietly for a long time, I go to sleep. If I have music going, people talking, walking around, doing a lot of different things, thats when I become creative...
I would have to strongly disagree with this argument. Working in solitude is not better than working in a group is not better than working in solitude, it is just different. The only way one is better or worse than the other is when it comes down to the characteristics of the individual person.
Having developed many projects, I personally can attest that I don't get anything productive done until everybody is asleep or if I decide to tune everybody out. It seems like there are too many real and "potential" distractions that my mind is chewing on instead of coming up with solutions to problems.
I have found it helpful to come together as a group once I have had plenty of time to think about what I want to do, along with the others having that same opportunity. That way we can have a discussion about ideas that have been thought through instead of just winging it.
Well guess what: at each and every job interview I've been to, I lied and pretended I enjoyed working with others, when in reality I like being left the fuck alone to do a good job.
The obvious questions that come to mind are how many jobs and how many interviews? Is all that BS you've been peddling getting what you need and what you want?
Not to any employer. If you've found a company that actually wants (and is willing to pay for) a proper solution, then I suggest that you do everything that you can to make sure you keep your job there. Most companies want a vaguely good-enough solution right now, and if it's a money sink in two years then, well, it will be someone else's responsibility by then...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Because as Marti Olsen points out, the majority of people are extroverts, and assume anyone who is not like them is defective. So extroverts love brainstorming, group think and other social work environments, so they think everyone should enjoy it and demand it in others.
The right answer is, as other people have said on this thread, balance. Sometimes we should work together, but also sometimes we should leave each other the f--- alone.
But because extroverts tend to be disconnected from facts and experience, they instead remember when they were happiest which was brainstorming sessions or other team activities. Thus they demand it.
To be fair, that's only about 30% of the hiring managers out there. The other 70% actually want people with political skills. The ability to negotiate with people they disagree with, to get people to go along with an idea, to contribute to the group when required instead of being a lone wolf causing problems or sniping. Introverts make excellent politicians in this regard--usually the Karl Rove backroom operator or chief-of-staff. But it's somehow off-putting to state: "Don't be an obstinate asshole who has to get his way and bullies others to achieve his goals -- yes, that means not you, John Bolton." on the job posting.
So just look at "work well with others" and "enjoy team work" to mean you're not a douchebag or a dickhead. It doesn't necessarily mean you are a people person.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
How can you tell an introverted software developer from an extroverted one?
When an introverted programmer talks to you, he stares at his shoes.
When an extroverted programmer talks to you, he stares as your shoes.
>> Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they carry on asking those "skills"?
It's a submission ritual. By asking you a silly question and evaluating your answer, they judge how much you are willing to play by the rules, no matter how ridiculous.
So extroverts love brainstorming, group think and other social work environments, so they think everyone should enjoy it and demand it in others.
You're giving them too much credit. First principles - they enjoy listening to themselves talk, and the others are only waiting for their turn to talk. A "circle jerk," if you will.
There's a lovely article written by epistemological philosopher Susan Haack (who was teaching philosophy at the University of Miami at print time) titled "Preposterism and its Consequences." The book is "Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate." Her central argument is this: philosophy is a contemplative discipline, and as such sometimes requires years of effort to be spent pursuing a line of investigation - usually in solitude - that may turn out fruitless. But the present culture of frequent publication - that any professor seeking tenure or stature must demonstrate a frequent presence in scholarly journals, at conferences, &c. &c. - forces academics into a sort of busywork that completely disrupts any real progress they might make.
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.
I'm also in a creative field (music), and the only way I can get anything useful done is to work from 23:00 to 04:00. The consequence of keeping those hours is that I'm mostly useless during business hours, so I'm a bit of a recluse in my department. I wish people like that (me), who need time away from, you know, people, would have their work ethic viewed more favorably, instead of it being an eccentric social shortcoming.
claimed that he liked working at the patent office as the quiet allowed him to think.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I am in the mainframe business, and I have always said the more technical skills you have, the less inter-personal skills you have...
There are still locations of solitude in my (work)life:
a) My office when no colleque is sharing my office (approx half a week)
b) Walking to the office
c) The room where you normally go alone (exceptions are girls and women which violate that constraint on occasion)
d) My shower
However, the problem with best locations (b-d), I normally do not have appropriate thought recording devices there, resulting in less efficiency.
The "big box stores" of the defense industry (Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin) absolutely will NOT give the beginning or experienced engineers any privacy (think "cube" of 48 sq feet). Maybe in the case of the fellow-level engineers they might be assigned a cube with a door (but the walls do NOT go to the ceiling). One can enjoy the all the noise of fellow social misfits who don't understand (or care) that their voices travel, their lunch stinks and voice mail should not be reviewed using speaker phone.
I've worked for all three and the "leadership" (not to be confused with simple project management drones) don't understand the concept of personal space. They all feel we should enjoy the "synergy", "diversity" and "insert your least favorite buzz phrase here".
Indeed, I remember an employer a while back that was willing to pay for the bare minimum solution, then cut it back after a while. Needless to say that was a very frustrating place to work if you had any sort of work ethic whatsoever as you could never actually accomplish anything.
All the below are the joy of your friendly IT guy. Gone are the days you could let yourself grow a beard and go evangelizing about freedom, all that's remained is put your earplugs on and play Angry Birds.
Statistics of office time, high end IT corporate:
20% Coffee Machine chat, talking about the weather, your stock options, the food in the kitchen and any other business relevant subject
30% Meetings. No further description necessary as that's exactly the productive outcome of all of them: absolutely nothing.
20% Someone screaming in panic for some problem that does not exist or has no relevance whatsoever, but still fills the working day of everyboy
5% Finding back a free chair, reconnecting power and network someone has stolen from your laptop, recovering all lost sessions, uh where's the laptop?
10% Trying to discern useful emails from false positive from the monitoring system and useless conversations running on empty
8% desperately try to find concentration by sending away all sorts people coming ask silly questions
2% working, creating, creating solutions while concentrated
All this naturally is different when Corporate stuff comes through, in that case the items above make space for
20% finding anything amongst the corporate IT resources
30% trying to understand the HR system, have it working, fight with someone in India to get the right free days and such
38% waiting while antivirus/antimalware/unattended reboots/lockups/hardware faults happen on your working system
Yes, I know the total is more than 100%.
"Brainstorming" is just a way for managers to claim part ownership of creative ideas other people already had before going into the "Brainstorming" session.
It's one of those "nobody-left-behind" ideas where everybody gets to give input while the actual creative people have to listen to all the bullshit going on.
I've had to listen in on hour-long brainstorming sessions where everybody gets to spew their ideas without interruption, only to have some guy at the end (they always have the guy who actually knows what he's talking about at the end) explain their "solutions" weren't actually addressing the question at hand. The only things they seem to do is let everybody claim ownership in the idea the one smart guy already head before going into the room, simply because they were in the same meeting where he first announced it.
Anybody who thinks creativity can come from formal meetings has obviously never had a creative idea in their entire life.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Serious question: do you still work at Microsoft?
now I can lecture others
No you can't. You wouldn't be an introvert if you did.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The buzzphrases are just justifications to avoid dealing with the fact that walls cost money. Some of them may believe their own schtick, some may not.
Management will always disapprove of solitude and independent employees because they can't take credit for the work completed and justify making higher salaries than those who actually spawn the good ideas and do great work.
Uh, duh.
Next stupid article.
I agree. I work in an open plan environment, and wish that I was in a room by myself. The 'scrum' as you call it is great for sharing the overview to let everyone know some of the detail from other people's work, so that there are not clashes or double-effort. Otherwise, give me a quiet and uninterrupted environment; even give me the high-walled cobicles of Dilbert!
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
This is not new, it has been discovered in 1913, by a french agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect
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
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.
5 Plumbers might but probably would not be able to solve the same tough pipe related problem as an engineering professor. But the 5 plumbers working around the table with the engineering professor will just annoy the engineering professor.
This is assuming average plumbers and a good professor as I have met well below average professors and well above average plumbers.
The two problems with the lone genius in an organization is that they make others look bad along with the fact that people with poor people skills don't usually play the politics correctly.
Then there is that lone genius who only has everyone convinced they are genius but their lack of genius causes disasters. I'm thinking about you, "Buffer overflow" Mike, who programs web "scripts" in c++ with inline assembly.
And I bet you whack off to Ayn Rand and think that you're some sort of John Galt for doing it, too.
Check your premises.
You mean quietly focusing on and concentrating on work leads to more production than joking around with the office buddies and talking to the receptionist down the hall? Brilliant!!
Am I the only one who had trouble reading the title at first, because the I read "Introversion" version as referring to the game company that made Darwinia and Uplink?
Ah - this is not balance.
But hey - I'm sure you'll do great hiring all the extroverted, group thinking types who copied each other's homework for your development team.
You know, the ones who were swapping media with the coding assignments on it 15 minutes before class instead of paying the dues of the late night hack sessions while in college.
I can already smell the stench of buggy, unmaintainable, inefficient, undocumented, crash prone expensive code from here.
But hey - at least you're creating jobs for us elitists. Because eventually, with an attitude like that, you're going to wind up on your knees, begging us to take your money and insane signing bonus to fix the mess you're going to create.
Check your premises.
Who would have thought that actually leaving someone alone and not distracting them with last night's Dancing with the Stars highlights would actually lead to them thinking rich thoughts and completing work. This is Nobel Prize-worthy research!
Left disappointed. WTB new uplink/darwinia :P
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People who are overly gregarious are attempting to fulfill a need for friendship/belonging to a group. The highest performers are probably up at building self esteem or self-actualization. Its not that they still don't need friends. But those needs are probably largely satisfied elsewhere. And the key to self esteem and self actualization is 'self'. Hence the need to work independently.
Conversely, the worst performers are probably down at the bottom of the hierarchy. If your employees are worrying about keeping their houses or feeding their family, they aren't performing as well on the job.
Have gnu, will travel.
And I bet you whack off to Ayn Rand and think that you're some sort of John Galt for doing it, too.
Geez, I've yet to meet a manager who even knows who Ayn Rand or John Galt are. Holy ad hominem argument, Batman!
I also read Nietzsche and Aristotle. Wanna slap me around for that too?
They're just ideas. If you can't handle people entertaining ideas, just crawl back in your hole til it all blows over. "Greetings, professor Falken." Now, if you don't mind, Wargames is on.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Actually walls can be less expensive than cubes.
Totally agree. I find it unproductive to brainstorm with a group but back in college I was forced to do that with group projects wasting valuable time, and nowadays with some friends insisting that we work as a group. Too much restrictions they put on and I'll have to spend 90% of my time explaining things which I usually do not like to do. I am not comfortable working with a group in general, it's not natural for me, how about managing a group of people! Yes I was asked at work to be the next section supervisor and I told them that I'm not interested. I hate meetings, bureaucracy and overly socializing.
My supervisor keeps irritating me in brainstorming sessions. He usually doesn't understand what I am saying and it's is difficult to tell him my perspective or ideas especially if it's out of the box. I find it much more easier to communicate with introverts and they easily catch it with minimum number of words to blurt out. Hell, some introverts can understand me just by looking in my eye!
I'd hire someone who put that on their resume, in a heartbeat. At least for an initial interview.
Honesty is somewhat lacking out there. This at least demonstrates the person knows when people are retards. How many problems could be averted because hyuck-hyuck good-natured people who are otherwise competent just go along with some idiot's ideas?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
No comment on the article, but I read an interesting book about the "flow" phenomenon written by this Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi guy.
"Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they carry on asking those "skills"?"
At the very least it shows you can bend reality and your own inclinations to your (prospective) company desires. This might not make you a "social monster" but shows you to be a "good enough company minion".
Most employers recognize you working-class-hero types are 90% garbage. Holding out for a proper solution would realistically mean it would never get done.
Bullshit, and probably an intentional troll that I've fallen for.
Most businesses do a cost-benefit analysis. Given the choice of doing a solution that kind-of works in two months and one that works well in two years, the first gives you 22 months of income from selling your products / services before the second is ready and costs a lot less. It's only industries like aerospace, where a product failure is very expensive that you have the luxury of doing things properly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Once in a while a great, ground-breaking movie gets made. And then come a myriad of cheap knock-offs with lots of explosions which were the product of GroupThink. And then again, once in a while there comes along solo effort like "Certified Copy" which people think must be the work of a genius because it was a solo effort when in reality it is yet another annoying, cheap clone. That's why the article states that BALANCE is required.
Knowing that solitude causes depression, I have to wonder what would happen to you guys if you would actually get what you wanted.
To make a point I will use the spare time I currently have, to take erotic massage lessons. This is entirely legal where I live, so don't bother worrying about or copying this.
I know that guys won't easily get a job in this profession, so this will be the hobby to counterbalance the idiocy we are subjecting ourselfs to.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Je me souviens.
I've noticed this from my reading. Isolation and lack of entertainment seem to cause the brain to go inward and create its own novelty: new ideas and peceptions. Boredom is the great source of creative thought in my opinion. But do we have much boredom anymore? We have so many young people wasting the creative years of their lives playing XBOX and pursuing the multitude of boredom-slaying options of today that I'm afraid that creative thought is coming to a screeching halt. We need to turn off the TVs and the XBOXs and tell children (and adults) to find something to do themselves instead of having it given to them, costless. We need to cultivate boredom once again in children (and ourselves). "Go out to play." "But what can I do?" "I don't know, find something." We built treehouses and thought about the universe. We tried to catch frogs and wondered about how frogs came about from the masses of squirming pollywogs that appeared each year. Einstein was riding his bike as a kid -- no doubt bored to death -- and wondered what it would be like to be at the head of a beam of light. If he were playing a shooter in his every spare minute, or watching TV, would he have?
E Proelio Veritas.
Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they carry on asking those "skills"?
Because those things are important. Being able to "bullshit" your way through an interview generally means you have enough social skills not only to get by in their environment, but also to work with everyone else.
To be blunt, I think it's more a result of the US educational system (including college) than some fad of extroverts. There really are a lot of people with poor to non-existent social skills being cranked out by a remarkably weak educational system. Those sorts of people can be a nightmare to work with.
Team, team team. http://youtu.be/pGFGD5pj03M
the majority of people are extroverts
Even worse, it's pretty much a requirement to be an extrovert if you want to be a manager. Some are sensitive to the fact that not everyone likes to live in a frat house, but those seem to be in the minority. And introverted managers are almost always very bad at their job.
That's great to hear. Now get off my lawn!
Also, this might the reason why politicians don't accomplish anything.
Needless to say I agree with this post.
What a great Idea everyone fix your own damn problem and leave me alone. Up side I get my work done you learn how to get your work done.
Because people who are recruiting you dont do anything themselves, so "social skills" is all they have. If all I have is a doughnut, it must be the best thing since Jesus, right? Right?
Not trying to say anything about your work style or ethic. It sounds like you would be really good at solving complex problems. But just a critic of that line.
Reading the whole line for a large scale problem it sounds good. But I cringe when I read "long and hard on any problem". It would make me wonder if you would spend a long time trying to determine how to best implement and architect a new button for members to sign up. What I would want as a hiring manager is someone who can quickly understand a problem and spend the appropriate amount of time and effort into fixing it. If it is a large complex problem I want you to work long and hard. But I'm not going to hire someone who is only good at working on large complex problems.
Internet access is a communication medium, which can be incompatible with solitude.
Maybe individual "most creative" people would benefit from leaving them alone, but most people aren't "most creative", just average. I'd bet that for average people brainstorming works better than solitudal thinking since there's not a single person that would get the whole picture of the problem at hand.
So, on a bigger scale teamwork is more beneficial.
"I understand a moment later--whether reading or talking to you, but when i read something complicated, like a translation thats doesn't lend it self to english, i sometimes notice that the text will blur and then become clear, this is the moment that the raw info melts in to my mind. unless the tv is on, as my animal sensory subconscious views its words no differently than a lion stalking me in the bush--or even worse, an itelligent presense.
Basement Dwellers agree that introversion is awesome
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle