The Art of Extroversion

I have often suspected that one of the greatest luxuries available to a human being is not wealth, nor leisure, nor even freedom in its political sense, but the ability to approach another person without wanting anything from them.

This is a rarer gift than it first appears.

To sit beside a stranger at dinner; to find yourself in conversation with a fellow passenger on a train; to encounter a friend of a friend at a crowded gathering and ask them, with genuine interest rather than social obligation, who they are and how they came to be the particular and improbable creature standing before you; these things ought to be among the most ordinary experiences of life, and yet they are becoming, I think, increasingly unusual. We have become accustomed to treating other people either as obstacles to be avoided or opportunities to be exploited.

I realised this several months ago while attending a (though I despise the term) networking event in a room filled with exactly the people you might expect. There were polished shoes and polished conversations taking place in little circles around the room, with students exchanging LinkedIn profiles with all the romance of neighbouring kingdoms exchanging trade agreements. It was impossible not to notice how much effort was being expended in appearing interesting and how little in being interested.

Everywhere you looked, conversations were collapsing beneath the weight of self presentation. Questions existed just to create opportunities for answers. People were not speaking to one another so much as advertising themselves in one another’s direction.

And yet, in the corner of the room, there was an older gentleman whose name I never learned. For almost an hour he spoke with a succession of strangers and not once, as far as I could tell, did he mention his own profession, achievements, opinions, travels, qualifications, investments, ambitions or connections.

He asked questions. Endless questions. Thoughtful questions.

When he discovered that I was, in part, studying urban planning, he wanted to know why certain cities seemed to possess personalities while others felt interchangeable. When a student mentioned learning Farsi, he became fascinated by the peculiar emotional atmosphere of languages and whether thoughts changed shape when translated. When somebody remarked that they had recently returned from Norway, he spent a while asking about winter darkness, not because he intended to visit Norway himself but because the phenomenon interested him.

What struck me was not that he appeared extroverted.

He did not.

Yet by the end of the evening more people had gravitated towards him than towards anyone else in the room.

Our modern conception of extroversion is theatrical. We imagine the extrovert as a performer; a person of inexhaustible confidence who enters rooms as storms enter coastlines, announcing themselves through force of personality.

The introvert, meanwhile, is imagined as their opposite; withdrawn, hesitant, private, content with solitude.

Entire industries have emerged around this distinction. Books have been written. Personality tests administered. Identities constructed. One is almost tempted to believe that humanity consists of only two tribes who happen to share a planet.

But I am not convinced.

There are people who can address an audience of five hundred and yet struggle to speak honestly with one stranger. There are people who claim to dislike socialising but who, when they encounter a topic they genuinely care about, will spend four uninterrupted hours discussing it with complete absorption.

Perhaps extroversion has been misdiagnosed.

Perhaps it is not a quantity of speech but a direction of attention.

This possibility interests me because it transforms extroversion from a personality trait into something approaching an art; and the arts, unlike traits, can be cultivated.

The greatest conversationalists I have known possessed an almost childlike relationship with the world. They retained the assumption that everything contained something worth discovering. Most adults lose this assumption. Familiarity settles over life like dust over furniture. We stop asking why things are the way they are, and this causes the world to narrow. People narrow with it.

Children, by contrast, are natural extroverts in the deepest sense of the word. This is not rooted in confidence, but in curiosity. They approach existence as explorers rather than judges.

What if the art of extroversion is simply the refusal to outgrow this habit?

I sometimes think that intellectual life and social life are far less separate than they appear. We tend to imagine curiosity as something exercised upon books, theories, historical events, scientific discoveries; yet people are perhaps the most fascinating subject available to us.

Every human being is a library assembled from experiences no one else has lived through. Entire continents of memory remain hidden behind ordinary faces. To meet somebody is to stand before an unopened book whose contents are inaccessible unless sufficient patience and interest are applied.

This, it seems to me, is where genuine extroversion lies.

It is not found in confidence.

Nor is it found in charisma.

It is certainly not found in networking.

But, it is found in fascination.

The fascinating thing about fascination is that it leaves very little room for self consciousness. The moment you become interested in another person, your attention departs from yourself. You cease monitoring your own behaviour because something more compelling has captured your attention.

And perhaps that is why the most socially gifted people often appear so effortless: they are not thinking about themselves.

The rest of us are.