Being an introvert is a bad thing, right? Well, a lot of people seem to think so, judging by the number of articles I’ve read about how to “cure” introversion. In response to these articles, I wrote The Introverts Strike Back, in which I argued that (1) introverts can’t become extraverts, and (2) they shouldn’t particularly want to.

First, let’s get clear on what we’re talking about. I’m going by the definitions used by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. According to the MBTI, introverts get their energy from the internal world of ideas and images, and they feel drained if they spend too much time with people. On the other hand, extraverts (and yes, that IS the correct spelling as used in the MBTI) get their energy from the external world of people and things, and they go crazy if they spend too much time alone. It really has nothing to do with social skills, as evidenced by introverts like Jerry Seinfeld.

Whether you prefer the internal world or the external world, that preference is fixed. You can force yourself to act outside of your element, but an introvert can’t become an extravert and vice versa. Let’s face it, if hosting The Tonight Show for 30 years didn’t turn Johnny Carson into an extravert, I doubt tips like “say hi to more people” will do the trick.

However, introversion certainly has its advantages. For example, introverts make up a slight majority of the upper levels of government, the military, and the corporate world, despite being only 30% of the population. The social outcast doesn’t represent all introverts, any more than the dumb jock represents all extraverts.

But I’m not here to debate whether it’s better to be an introvert or an extravert. The fact is, we all have to interact with both types every day. Regardless of which type you are, you can greatly improve your relationships by learning to get along better with people of the other type. Here are some tips for getting started.
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Can the self be improved? What is the self, anyway? Does the currently popular “self-help movement” really help us or is it a paradoxical diversion from our true self?

I hope that you will help me in addressing these questions that have been increasingly pervading my thoughts as the term, self-improvement, is now so widely used, and quite often misused, that its meaning seems diluted, almost to the point of becoming abstract.

In fact, the more I think of it, the more I doubt that “self-improvement” is possible…
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There’s a mountain of personal development literature out there about improving the material circumstances of your life, mostly by making more money and becoming more productive. A topic that gets less coverage, however, is what we’re supposed to do with all the extra money and time these books, articles and workshops promise us.

Money and time, of course, aren’t valuable unless we have inspiring ideas about what to do with them. If you received $1 million tomorrow, for example, but you weren’t allowed to spend it on anything, it would be worthless to you. If you could add an extra hour to your day by eliminating procrastination, but you had no compelling vision of what to do with that hour, it wouldn’t be very useful. As Martin Hawes and Joan Baker write in Get Rich, Stay Rich, “to set out to make a lot of money for its own sake, without a bigger goal, is to doom yourself to a life of disappointment.” Nonetheless, many of us treat acquiring more money and time as the principal goals of our journey toward personal growth.

Some suggest that, beyond sheer survival, our quest for money and time is about being able to do more, and spend more time with, our loved ones and friends. For example, with more money and productivity, perhaps we could afford, and have the time, to take the family to a foreign country for a week. I think this answer is close to the truth, but doesn’t quite hit the mark. Merely spending more time with our loved ones—even if we do it in more expensive and exotic locales—doesn’t guarantee we’ll enjoy that time together. If relations between us are tense or uncomfortable, we may end up wishing we were back in the office.
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The amount of time we spend seeking happiness in the future is mind boggling. We spend exorbitant volumes of time doing things that will supposedly make us happy at some future date.

• We educate ourselves to attain a better career.
• We work long hours to have more money.
• We exercise our minds and bodies for greater strength and intelligence.

We improve for the sake of improving that somewhere, at some distant point down the beaten road we’ll find happiness.

All the while we’re chasing happiness, we don’t realize the fatal, vicious circle we place ourselves in. We’ve habituated ourselves into placing our happiness in the future. We’ve conditioned ourselves into allowing happiness after some level of achievement, that never comes.

We fail to realize a fatal flaw in our logic: what matters most is how you feel. Now.
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