When I was 22, a manager sat me down after a team event and told me I needed to “put myself out there more.” He said it like he was doing me a favor. Like he was handing me the key to a door I’d been too timid to open.
I smiled, said I’d work on it, and then spent the next decade trying to become someone who thrived in the situations that drained me. More networking. More group dinners. More saying yes to things that left me sitting in my car afterward needing thirty minutes of silence before I could drive home.
Everyone meant well. “Be more social.” “You need more friends.” “Put yourself out there.” The advice came from parents, colleagues, girlfriends, self-help books, and the entire cultural machinery of a world that treats extroversion as the default setting for a successful human life. And I believed them. For years, I believed there was something wrong with me that could be fixed by more socializing.
I’m 37 now. I live in Saigon with my wife and daughter. I run a business with my brothers. I meditate every morning, run before the city wakes up, and spend most of my working hours alone with words and ideas. My social circle is small. My evenings are quiet. And my life works, genuinely works, in a way it never did during the years I spent trying to be someone louder.
The things that made my life work were the things nobody told me to value.
The extroversion bias is real, and it’s everywhere
Western culture has a deep, well-documented preference for extroverted qualities. Research has consistently found that extroversion correlates with higher self-reported happiness, more social capital, and broader support networks. A study published in Health Psychology Open examining the relationship between introversion-extroversion and happiness confirmed that people with higher extroversion tend to be more averse to aloneness and respond to social stimuli with greater attention and positivity.
But here’s what that same study found that rarely makes the headline: social support from friends and family was more strongly correlated with happiness for introverts than for extroverts. Lower social loneliness had a bigger impact on introverted people’s wellbeing than on extroverted people’s. In other words, connection matters more to introverts, not less. We just need it in a different form.
The advice I was given my whole life treated quantity as the variable. More events. More people. More visibility. The research suggests the variable that actually matters is depth. And depth is the thing introverts are naturally built for.
What nobody told me to value
Here are the things that actually made my life work. None of them appeared in any advice I was ever given about how to succeed as a quiet person in a loud world.
Solitude that I chose on purpose. Research on who thrives in solitude, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found that personality factors like introversion, independence, and capacity for introspection were associated with experiencing positive solitude. But the key distinction was between solitude that was chosen and solitude that was imposed. Self-determined solitude, the kind you seek out because you need it, not because you’re hiding, is associated with wellbeing. Imposed solitude is associated with loneliness. For years I couldn’t tell the difference in my own life because the culture around me treated all aloneness as a problem to be solved.
What changed everything was giving myself permission to need solitude without pathologizing it. The morning meditation on my cushion before my wife and daughter wake up. The solo runs along the Saigon River. The hours of deep work where I don’t speak to anyone and produce the best writing of my day. These aren’t symptoms of a social deficit. They’re the engine of my entire life.
A very small number of deep relationships. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has tracked participants for over 85 years, didn’t find that the happiest people had the most friends. It found that the happiest people had relationships where they felt genuinely known and could count on the other person during hard times. Depth, not breadth.
I have my wife. I have my brothers. I have Mal, who I’ve worked with for years and who knows the actual texture of my life, not the curated version. I have maybe three or four other people I can call when things aren’t going well. That’s it. And for a long time I thought that number was a failure. Every piece of advice I’d absorbed told me I needed more. Wider circle. Bigger network. More people at the table.
It took me until my mid-thirties to realize that what I had wasn’t too little. It was exactly right. The relationships were deep. The trust was real. And one genuine phone call with someone who knows you is worth more than a hundred pleasant interactions with people who don’t.
Work that let me go deep instead of wide. I write for a living. I sit alone and think about ideas and try to make them clear on a page. For years I felt vaguely apologetic about this, like I should be doing something that involved more meetings and more visibility. But writing is deep work. It requires the exact cognitive profile that introversion provides: sustained concentration, comfort with extended solitude, and the ability to sit with an idea long enough for it to become something real.
The business I run with my brothers produces roughly sixty articles a day across our network. That doesn’t happen through networking lunches. It happens through hours of focused, solitary effort multiplied across a small team of people who are built the same way I am.
A daily practice that rewards stillness. In my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How to Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, I wrote about how Buddhist meditation isn’t about escaping yourself. It’s about meeting yourself in the silence that most people spend their lives avoiding. For introverts, that silence isn’t the obstacle. It’s the home. The cushion was the first place in my life where the things that made me different, the quietness, the inwardness, the preference for depth over breadth, were treated as assets rather than deficiencies.
The advice I wish I’d been given
Instead of “put yourself out there,” I wish someone had said: “Go deeper in the places you already are.”
Instead of “you need more friends,” I wish someone had said: “You need fewer friends and more honesty within the friendships you have.”
Instead of “be more social,” I wish someone had said: “Learn the difference between the loneliness that comes from not having enough people and the loneliness that comes from not being known by the people you already have. They require completely different solutions.”
And most of all, I wish someone had said: “The things that come naturally to you, the solitude, the deep focus, the preference for one real conversation over ten shallow ones, those aren’t obstacles to a good life. They’re the foundation of one. Stop trying to fix them. Start building on them.”
What my life looks like now
I wake up early in Saigon. I sit on the cushion. I run. I drink ca phe at a coffee shop where the owner pours my coffee before I sit down and doesn’t require a conversation in exchange. I write for several hours, alone, in the quiet of our apartment. I have lunch with my wife. I work with my team in the afternoon, mostly asynchronously, mostly through writing. I pick up my daughter. We eat dinner. I read. I go to bed.
From the outside, it probably looks like a small life. Not enough events. Not enough people. Not enough of the social currency that the extroverted world uses to measure a person’s relevance.
From the inside, it’s the largest life I’ve ever lived. Because nothing in it is performed. Nothing in it exists to impress anyone. Every piece of it was chosen by the actual me, not the version of me that spent a decade trying to be louder, wider, and more visible in order to satisfy a set of standards that were never designed for someone like me.
If you’re an introvert reading this, here’s the thing I want you to hear: there is nothing wrong with you. The world gave you a set of instructions written for a different operating system. You don’t need to follow them. You need to write your own. And when you do, you’ll discover that the life that fits you was always available. You just couldn’t see it through all the noise you were told to make.