For seven blissful years I had spent my time reading, writing and researching a book about introversion. But the publication date had arrived, the id… - Susan Cain

Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life — and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. It’s the state you enter when you cry tears of joy — which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending. When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle, she explains, we aren’t simply happy: “We’re also appreciating, even if it’s not explicit, that this time of life will end; that good times pass as well as bad ones; that we’re all going to die in the end. I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive. That’s emotional development.

Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions — from the theory of evolution to van Gogh’s sunflowers to the personal computer — came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there.

Persistence isn’t very glamorous. If genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the 1 percent. We love its flash and dazzle. But great power lies in the other 99 percent.