Introvert vs. Extravert: Which One Has More Chances to Succeed?

Ever thought of whether there’s an expectation or prediction to be formed of how successful one could become in their professional and personal life based on the fact whether they are an introvert or an extravert? I’ve been wondering about it a lot and more inclined to think that a correlation between being an extrovert and being successful is pretty obvious. This comes by and large from a – at least in the Western society – traditional idea of success associated with being extraverted rather than introverted. However, as some research I did on this topic reveals, this issues is much more nuanced and subtle than it might appear at first. My belated November blog post is therefore devoted to the topic of introversion vs. extraversion as related to the professional success as well as personal well being in general.

Just a little introduction of the concepts and their history to start with. Through popular psychology and colloquial use the terms introversion and extraversion are nowadays known and more or less clear to the general public. As major dimensions of human personality theories, the terms had been popularized by Carl Jung, though both popular understanding and psychological use of the concepts differ somewhat from the original definitions. Simply put, extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behaviors, whereas introversion – in more reserved and solitary ones. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a psychometric questionnaire designed by Myers and Briggs based on Carl Jung’s description of psychological types, is a generally used tool to ‘diagnose’ a person’s degree of introversion – extraversion.

If you rely on most of self-improvement books on how to become a successful and effective individual, it seems that most of them are promoting an extravert type of behavior to some extent. Feel free to disagree with me, but behaviors like being proactive, taking initiative in contacting people and undertaking equivalent actions can hardly be described as solitary or reserved. Basically, what it comes down to in order to succeed professionally one has to be good at selling things, whether it’s selling yourself to a potential employer or your product or service to a potential customer. Wouldn’t you therefore expect a perfect salesperson to be an extravert? To my astonishment, I read this article, claiming that this in my opinion very logical expectation is not exactly true. Best salesmen are evidently to be found in the middle of the introversion – extraversion scale! Just read the article if you also are intrigued…

Scoring somewhat in the direction of introversion myself, I’ve always been interested in this: knowing yourself, is it smarter to adjust your life, both privately and professionally, to fit the kind of person you are or is it possible / desirable to try and change by practicing some more ‘marketable’ (read: extravert) behaviors?

Well, obviously no extremes are good. You can always ‘train’ yourself in certain things, also in being more outgoing and therefore slightly more of an extravert. Also, if for instance you are not comfortable calling people on the phone for professional or business purposes, practicing by just doing it helps. No wonder: like in most matters practice makes perfect. If you are extremely introverted, you’d probably be better off in an occupation having more to do with technique, substances, data or even animals than with people, while the contrary would be true for the opposite side of the scale. The in-betweeners would presumably fit in a wider range of professions, with some accents on their particular role depending on which end of the scale they tend to more.

You could also choose to move to a country, which is more introvert or extravert friendly. I came across this lively discussion on a forum: Western countries, like USA, Canada and the most of Western Europe are said to be more extravert-oriented, including Scandinavia, with only Germany agreed to be an exception. Asian countries, like China, Korea and Vietnam, contrary to what might be expected, are reported to be rather extravert-focused: leaving other people alone for too long is considered not done there and therefore is the social aspect in these countries pretty strong. Thinking of Ukraine where I was born and grew up, I’d say that introversion is not necessarily a crime there, given that people do not talk to or smile at total strangers, but again, there’s more to a culture than just establishing contact with people you don’t know and so I prefer not to generalize it this way.

While success and happiness are quite subjective notions after all which I’m certainly planning to discuss a lot more in the upcoming posts, it stands to reason to conclude that arranging your life and work appropriately around being either an introvert or an extravert would be most efficient given that the most important difference between the two is in the ways they recharge their energies. 

What’s your idea of the influence of this interesting personality trait on our life? Any thoughts or experiences with how introvert or extravert friendly different countries are? I’m very interested to find out!