This text was originally published on my former blog typeoneminimalist.com. The website has been offline since 2020. This is an archive version.

We live in a war of noise and information. Whoever screams the loudest, gets the attention. Not everybody is made for this kind of blast though. An introvert’s guide to navigating our noisy planet.

When I visited the TEDx-Event in Vienna a few weeks ago, this girl was sitting next to me. During every two-hour-long speaking-session, she would take out her notebook and start drawing. Completely random stuff. Flowers, circles, labyrinths. Occasionally, she would interrupt her flow by taking notes of one of the talks. At first, I found it a bit awkward. Why would you pay 100€ or more for a day full of inspiring speeches and then focus on drawing? And then I understood.

I talked to her during the breaks quite a bit. She was a super-kind person enjoying the event a lot. And from what I’ve realised, she drew to recharge her mind. With her notebook in her hands, she split herself apart from the rest of the hall, only focussing on the talk and herself. For someone with a more introverted personality, this is genius.

The war within ourselves

Observing the girl’s actions made me fall back onto one thought: I’m introverted – and I often feel uncomfortable about it. Why? Isn’t everyone supposed to create and achieve greatness using their personality as a basis? Not necessarily. Our society is geared towards extroversion – especially in education and business. As author Susan Cain puts it, we’re currently living after a system called “New Groupthinking” – where the idea is that creative moments come from random encounters while interacting with people. And while that’s all fine and good, it leaves very little space for deep thinking and focus. Which is exactly what introverts are good at.

To give you some context, introverts are in general people who recharge their energy with alone-time, close people and deep talks. Whereas extroverts recharge by interacting with people. And before anyone screams “This isn’t a black and white thing though!!!!!”. No. Indeed, it’s not. Every person is both. However, we tend to lean more towards one side. Therefore, everyone is a mixture of both personality-types with one coming through stronger.

It’s difficult to measure but studies suggest that roughly half of the Western world’s population leans towards the introverted side while the other half tends to be more extroverted.

Considering the facts, all people should be valued the same. Everybody has his/her strengths and weaknesses. In reality, my experience is a bit different. The quiet kid in school is still perceived as awkward and the business-world is a war-zone about who is loudest. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve been told to “act a bit more aggressive”. But is aggression really the solution?

A quiet soldier avoiding bombs

Sometimes, when I get home after a long day, I feel like I spent the day on the battlefield. I’m physically and mentally exhausted and all I want to do is to not meet people. Since I work in media and journalism, it’s surprisingly not the interviews or the focussed writing that exhaust me. It’s the sheer amount of meetings which to me have no sense at all. I would be able to achieve at least twice as much if I had the time for myself. Yet here I am.

Over the years, I’ve learned to build up a resistance against situations like this. I’ve trained the extroverted side of my personality to become stronger and participate in discussions and brainstorming sessions. I’d also force myself to go out and meet with people and come home with the feeling that I’ve achieved something. Without a doubt, this greatly helped me build up my confidence. At the same time though, I neglected my introverted side a bit – which expressed itself through me always being exhausted. ALWAYS. And I didn’t realise why until recently.

With all the action going on around me, my introverted side simply had nothing to hold on. It was just a matter of time until it made a call for a break.

Changing strategies

I see “self-care” as a bit of a buzzword in today’s age. Not all self-care is equal and good. But undoubtedly, it’s immensely important to give your mind the rest it needs. And if this kind of rest is “not being around people” you shouldn’t neglect it – and neither should you neglect the urge to meet people.

So, what I did during the past few weeks was to sprinkle in a few “break-moments” throughout the days. In my case, this means reading a few pages of a book when I’m on the tram or just going for a walk when I need to order my thoughts.

Moreover, I tried to eliminate any secondary factors that drain my batteries. Bad social media habits, news without any value, YouTube-videos which don’t help me with anything. I stripped down the amount of information I take in each day by at least 50 per cent. And oh, it makes such a big difference. Not having to deal with yet another article about some politician saying something and the other politician saying a different thing makes me feel so much less drained. Since I study journalism, I still have to be up-to-date – which I just do differently now. My news consumption is not as “live” anymore as it once was. I check the news in the morning for around ten minutes and in the evening for five minutes. And the rest of the day I spend reading literature and magazines I actually enjoy.

Making peace

The essence of the story is that we have to make peace with ourselves in order to work properly. Only if we acknowledge who we are and what we need, we’re able to unleash our full potential.

We as people are able to change and train our mind a lot. But we can’t become a fundamentally different human from the ground up. I guess, instead of wasting energy on becoming this ideal person, it’s better to embrace the strengths we already have and work on our weaknesses. Doing that, we might eventually become our own version of our ideal.