How Introverts Quietly Dominate Self-Improvement

Leverage Quiet Strengths for Lasting Personal Growth

In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes about Rosa Parks:

“I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament, someone who could easily stand up to a busload of glowering passengers. But when she died in 2005 at the age of 92, the flood of obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was ‘timid and shy’ but had ‘the courage of a lion.’ They were full of phrases like ‘radical humility’ and ‘quiet fortitude.’”

Rosa Parks’ legacy is weaved into the fabric of American history. Her revolutionary choice to not give her seat up for a white man was, at the time, cataclysmic. The boldness of the action and grandeur of its consequence could fool anyone into assuming Rosa Parks was a bold, seemingly extroverted person. That wasn’t the case. Her ‘timid and shy’ persona is not one you’d typically assign to someone looking to radically alter the way racial equality is perceived and addressed in America and around the world, but Rosa Parks was unassuming in her bravery, her introversion providing fertile ground for the ‘courage of a lion’ to feed, grow, and roar.