

Why extroverts fail, introverts flounder and you probably succeed - petercooper
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/why-extroverts-fail-introverts-flounder-and-you-probably-succeed/2013/01/28/bc4949b0-695d-11e2-95b3-272d604a10a3_story.html?hpid=z2

======
wisty
Here's my copy-pasta:

MBTI is braindead pop-science which is based on the rantings of Jung. It was
good for the time (when measuring people's skulls to determine their
personality was popular) but has no place in modern science.

The biggest problem is, it's deliberately polarising. Jung thought there were
fundamental personality types, and that everyone would fall into a specific
box. That's good if you want to write a "what career is best for you" article
for Cosmo, or for school kids. But it's bad science. Most personality traits
are normally distributed, not categorial.

Most people are ambiverts, not introverts or extrovert. There's plenty of
people who are heavily introverted, and plenty of people who are heavily
extroverted, and it's useful to have a word for it, but most people aren't.

The other problem is, the traits it measures aren't important. Big 5
(Introversion, Openness to experience (i.e. culture / intelligence),
Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) is better. It uses more
interesting traits, and puts them on a scale (rather than using categories).
It's not perfect (there's no real model, it's just common factors in
personalities - psychologists often say it's overrated) but it's much better
than MBTI.

~~~
sageikosa
Meyers-Briggs was never meant to pigeon-hole people so that organizations
could be better aligned, or for social engineering purposes. As a
psychoanalytic tool, its main purpose is to help the subject understand his or
her own inclinations.

Any application outside of therapy or introspection is pop-science; and any
application within those fields is only relevant if the subject accepts the
categorizations of the test.

~~~
ahelwer
In that sense it's never struck me as anything more than horoscopes for those
who don't believe horoscopes.

~~~
gnaritas
Horoscopes base their descriptions on time of birth, Meyers Briggs on actual
answers from you; they are hardly comparable.

------
notahacker
Myers Briggs aims to measure preference rather than performance. A score
highly biased towards extroversion is just as likely to indicate a weakness in
"introverted" areas, such as approaching problems strategically, as it is to
indicate a strength in communication skills.

A better rule of thumb when looking for the right qualities in a salesperson,
especially a complex-software-solving-complex-problem salesperson, is to look
for someone that listens to the other party more than they talk.

~~~
at-fates-hands
This is how sales has changed drastically over the past 10-15 years. Before,
high pressure sales and using hard closing techniques have been replaced by a
more "consultative" approach. IT's a more humanistic approach to selling your
company wares.

Because of this, listening, or the appearance of listening has become the new
training tool for salespeople. As such, using an extroverted or introverted
label doesn't really apply.

------
grinnick
_Here’s the best part, however. The distribution of introverts and extroverts
in the population looks eerily like the results Grant found plotting revenue
across his 1-to-7 scale. Some of us are heavy introverts. Some of us are
stalwart extroverts. But the vast majority of us are ambiverts._

Surely these results could be explained by saying that we are better at
selling to people who are like us then?

Assuming there are few extroverts or introverts but lots of ambiverts in a
population of sales people and the same distribution is found in the people
being sold to. If we are better at selling to people similar to ourselves then
the ambiverts chosen for the experiment will perform well in a wider segment
of the population and hence make more sales.

------
sayemm
Link-bait title for a mildly interesting study. I'm not surprised at the
results, anyone with real sales/biz dev experience will tell you that
listening and asking the right questions are the way to sell people, not
"hustling" and being overly salesy/pushy - [http://www.amazon.com/SPIN-
Selling-Neil-Rackham/dp/007051113...](http://www.amazon.com/SPIN-Selling-Neil-
Rackham/dp/0070511136/)

That said though, how you define yourself as "extroverted", "introverted", or
an "ambivert" is questionable altogether.

------
deltasquared
Something sounds off here.

At face value the article is saying. If most people are "ambiverts" and
ambiverts make the best sales people, and sales people are the best leaders,
why are there not more leaders? Why is it that most people are not in charge.

Finding out that there is no correlation between extroversion and sales
performance is interesting and all but I think it would be better to find a
new scale to use, one with positive correlation for what you are looking for.

Pointing out that people's scores for extroversion fall along a normal
distribution, and that people's sales preform aces fall along a normal
distribution does not really say much.

Typically, a low correlation score means your model is wrong, not that you
need to fix your model by choosing a different locus.

------
albedoa
The article casts a wide net for what defines an ambivert:

 _Ambiverts [...] are people who are neither extremely introverted nor
extremely extroverted._

What can we really say about this third group if we are including everyone who
is not an extreme example of the other two?

------
keithpeter
> _"The distribution of introverts and extroverts in the population looks
> eerily like the results Grant found plotting revenue across his 1-to-7
> scale."_

'Ambiverts' make better marriages?

------
bjhoops1
Well, this makes me feel better about wondering for years whether I was really
an introvert or in fact an extrovert. Now I can be proud to claim the term
"ambivert"!

~~~
jgw
I wondered about this, too. I took a Meyers-Briggs test as a team-building
exercise once, and in the I-E continuum, I fell very mildly on the Introvert
side. But there are sub-categories in each of the fields, and I scored full
marks for "gregariousness".

So I've spent the last few years wondering what a gregarious introvert is.

I think it's someone who laughs very loudly at their own jokes.

~~~
silverbax88
To be honest, most people have a completely incorrect view of introverts. Many
stand up comedians are introverts. Many artists are introverts. Being an
introvert is not the same as shy.

~~~
donatzsky
That's something I've noticed myself, being something of an introvert. On a
number of occasions I've been "accused" of being timid, which I'm not,
although I guess it might come across that way. Or perhaps it's just that
introvert is a difficult word :)

------
rosenweiss
Disgusting.

~~~
jgw
You maintained a vow of silence for 225 days, and then broke it to write...
this? That's quite fascinating, actually.

~~~
Toenex
This made me laugh so much a little bit of wee came out.

~~~
fuck_google
This made me laugh so much a little bit of crap came out. Reminds me of the
recent product announcements by Google.

