14 People Talk About Your Single Most Underrated Trait

6. Margaret Weiss

Ability to be reasoned with.

Situations arise, challenges happen, emotions take the best of us, bias enter decisions, yet if a person can be logical and can be reasoned with, if a person can become above the petty noise of reality, it’s one item that will help move things along.

7. Anthony Johnson

Introversion, especially in Western nations where extroversion is held up as the gold standard of personalities that lead to success. Many of the world’s most successful introverts (including both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) were successful not in spite of their introversion, but because of it. When faced with hard problems, they more often than not turned to personal reflection and thought long and hard about the best ways to solve them on their own, which often generated clearer and better thought-out solutions and kept them from making many rash or catastrophic decisions.

This isn’t to say these people did things alone or didn’t have help, but rather they set the vision from within rather than depending on interaction with others to organically create it (“brainstorming” and the like) and that allowed them to maintain focus on singular objectives and be very successful at what they did.

It’s this ability to focus so intensely on single objectives in solitude that makes many introverted people some of the greatest artists, scientists, and inventors that ever lived. Yet for some reason, in Western cultures, this kind of personality trait is routinely considered non-optimal despite the fact that it produces as much valuable output as its more socially-inviting counterpart.