Self-Employment Is Good For Introverts
You don't need to wait for circumstances to change, when you can make the change yourself.
In which a “help wanted” advertisement inspires an article:
In the United States, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act Of 1964 protects employees and job applicants from discrimination based upon race, religion, gender, or country of origin. It does not, however, outlaw discrimination based on personality, something we can see very clearly from this advertisement (found September 2024) that Subway is hiring:
This definitely sounds familiar to me. My first ever job was bagging groceries at a grocery store in high school. When I applied for the job, the store gave me a personality questionnaire to fill out. I don’t remember any of the questions, but I do remember being told by the human resources manager afterwards that they didn’t recall any applicant who’d scored as low on it as I had, in the store’s entire history (it’d been open for about 4 years at that point).
A 16-year old kid who applies for a job at a grocery store wants to work there for a few months, or a couple of years, save up enough money to help pay for their car, or to buy a skateboard or an acoustic guitar, and head onto the next thing. They’re not there to wade into some epic personality struggle, of which only one tiny facet has been unveiled to them. In the unlikely event that they want to move into management, or oversee a regional branch of the chain, this would be an appropriate time to open the personality file to review and solve any concerns. For the situation I was in, it wasn’t appropriate for them to make that remark to me, especially considering they hired me anyways.
Making sandwiches and bagging groceries are jobs with no barrier to entry. No experience needed, no letters of recommendation to submit, no college degree to obtain. Do attitudes in jobs with no barriers to entry also exist in jobs with higher barriers? Are there people out there who missed their shot at a $100,000-a-year job, solely because they didn’t come across as talkative and giddy enough during their interview?
Susan Cain, in writing her book Quiet, spent some time at Harvard Business School, the ultimate shaper of American business practices. “This school is predicated on Extroversion”, one of the students tells her. “Your grades and social status depend on it.” 1 Another student doubts that there even are any Introverts at Harvard Business School.2 “The school tries hard to turn quiet students into talkers…If you’re preparing for class alone, then you’re doing it wrong. Nothing at HBS is intended to be done alone.3
Clearly, some graduates of Harvard Business School are interested in applying the lessons they learned there. “You have to be outgoing, fun and jazzed-up to work here”, the human resources director of an unnamed major media company, tells Cain.4 On the internet, we can find one Redditor’s story of applying for a job and being rejected, despite the interviewer commending their work ethic, because they scored as INTJ on a Myers-Briggs test.
This situation probably isn’t always a bad thing. Certainly there are careers where Introverts will, on average, outperform Extroverts, and vice versa. There are also many jobs where temperament directly affects your ability to perform the job; I’d hesitate before putting a fellow Introvert on a sales team, for instance. But Subway isn’t a sales team. There has never in history been a situation where someone’s experience at Subway was bad because the person making their B.L.T. didn’t also make enough small talk with them. There’s also no reason why a pleasant, friendly person, which is what Subway really wants, can’t be also be someone of few words.
We’re not here to complain, though, at least not without offering practical advice and a plan for action.
If you know a lot of Introverts who’ve expressed annoyance about the tyranny of personality in the workplace, strongly urge them to consider self-employment, learning an important skill and starting their own business. This would especially be useful in areas like coding and programming, trades, or fitness training, but a business can obviously be made for anything that people demand or need. If a business started by an Introvert grows large enough, it could also serve as a place where Introverts could be employed without having to worry about personality tyranny in the first place.
Are you a parent who thinks a child of theirs could be an Introvert? Do they display a marked preference for depth over breadth in their interests? Do they like to pause and observe before they begin participating in an activity, just so they understand it better? You owe it to them to encourage them to self-employment for this reason, or at the very least, to inform them about the biases exhibited by companies they might apply for one day. Let it not be said that no one was warned, let it not be said that no one knew the options they had.
As a postscript, check out how copywriter Chantal Panozzo, an Introvert, described her workplace in Introverted Switzerland:
“Copywriters and art directors worked much more autonomously in Switzerland than they did in the U.S. As a copywriter in Switzerland, I usually brainstormed alone and an art director designed what I came up with later. This contrasted sharply to my American advertising experiences working in copywriter-art director teams, where the team spent every working minute together in a room as if the only way to create an idea was to do it in a group.
The Swiss workplace was wonderful for someone like me: you never had to make small talk—no one in Swiss culture made small talk. And if you acted overly excited about almost anything work-wise or even not work-wise, the Swiss put you in your place. No one played ping-pong; there was no ping-pong. Productivity was rewarded—wasting time being a cheerleader was not.”
Cain, Susan. (2012). Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York City, New York. Broadway Books. Page 44.
Ibid.
Ibid, pages 44 to 45.
Ibid, page 48.