Being extroverted is absolutely a useful skill for certain things. Extroverts are going to talk to more people, which is going to make them better at networking and self promotion. Those things lead to making more connections, getting business opportunity, getting job opportunities, etc.

I'm not saying that you can't be functional as an introvert, but being extroverted is definitely useful in many situations.

Sure, statistically.

But there are far more important skills, like reflection, that trump that trait and an introvert will easily surpass an extrovert that is weak in learning from all those interactions.

That's a bad example to follow. Sociopaths are even better at self promotion.

> Extroverts are "good at communication" by nature.

Is that true they are good at it, or just more prolific with their communication?

Either the parent comment edited or you misquoted. Extroverts are not necessarily good at communication - quality over quantity is often better.

In the general case I'd bet on the person who gets more practice at something being better at it.

Yes, any given extrovert may not have good social skills, but extroverts as a class have better social skills on average through use.

They must have edited, I copy & pasted. And that was my exact thoughts regarding quality vs quantity.

apologies, I edited my grammatical mistake

> Being extroverted is not a useful skill.

The data disagrees with this assertion, to the point where quoting a single source would be silly (a quick search will find dozens of examples). Extroversion correlates with both income and happiness.

Being extraverted is not a skill at all. It is a trait.

You cannot learn to be more extraverted. You can learn to act that way; you can learn to interact and communicate better...but you cannot learn to change how your brain recharges.

>You cannot learn to be more extraverted. You can learn to act that way; you can learn to interact and communicate better...but you cannot learn to change how your brain recharges

My experience simply doesn't align with this.

I remember being confused about sexuality: I couldn't be gay because I also liked women, so I must be straight. Then I realized there was a word to describe attraction that's indifferent to gender. Also turns out I'm nonbinary, which handily resolved similar confusion over gendered expectations.

Anyway, you might be an ambivert. Society tries to shove us into neat, easy to reason about binaries, but humans just aren't binary. We exist largely on bimodal distributions and most people aren't all one or another of any particular thing.

Right—I perhaps should have been clearer about this in my own post. It's definitely a spectrum, not a binary, though I'm not at all sure the distribution is normal (ie, a bell curve). I don't have any actual sources on that, though, and I'd be very intrigued to see a scientific study giving a population-level distribution of those traits in particular.