Every piece of life advice I was given as an introvert was wrong — because the things that actually made my life work were the ones few people told me to value

by Lachlan Brown | May 19, 2026, 1:57 pm

For most of my 20s, I was quietly convinced that something was wrong with me. Not in a dramatic, therapy-couch way. Just a low hum in the background. The kind of feeling you get when everyone around you seems to be playing a game they understand, and you keep showing up not knowing the rules.

The advice I got was consistent. “You need to be more social.” “Get out there and meet people.” “You should have more friends.” Well-meaning people, genuinely trying to help. My mum. A few teachers. One particularly enthusiastic career counselor at Deakin who seemed personally offended by my preference for lunch alone in the library.

I followed the advice. I pushed myself to parties, said yes to group dinners I dreaded, and performed a version of extroversion I thought would fix whatever was broken. It didn’t work. I just ended up exhausted and a little hollow, wondering what everyone else was getting out of these interactions that I wasn’t.

Now, at 37, having built something I’m genuinely proud of, I can see what nobody told me back then. The things that actually worked in my life, the things that made me feel grounded and useful and alive, were the ones the world kept telling me were problems to overcome.

Solitude was never the enemy

The cultural script around introversion is basically this: alone time is a symptom. Something to be treated with more socialising, more networking, more presence in rooms full of people. But the research tells a different story. Recent studies on introversion and solitude suggest that introverts genuinely gain energy from time spent alone, and that this preference for solitude isn’t a deficiency but a feature of how introverted minds are wired.

I discovered Buddhism during my worst period. I was working a warehouse job in Melbourne, shifting TVs around on a loading dock, convinced I’d wasted my studies and my potential in equal measure. But I had breaks. And on those breaks, I’d sit by myself and read on my phone. Philosophy. Buddhism. Anything that helped me think more clearly about what I was doing and why.

That solitude, the kind people had been telling me to cure myself of, turned out to be exactly what I needed. Not because it was comfortable. It often wasn’t. But because it gave me access to my own thinking without the noise of what everyone else wanted me to be. Buddhist practice reinforced this. The whole tradition is built on the idea that stillness isn’t avoidance; it’s where clarity lives.

Research published in Applied Psychology found that mindfulness traits like non-reactivity and awareness make solitude a genuinely positive experience, not just a neutral one. The problem was never the quiet. The problem was that I hadn’t yet learned how to be with myself in it.

Fewer friends, deeper connections

The “you need more friends” advice always struck me as strange. Like friendship was a numbers game, and I was losing because my social network was too small. But introverts tend to build relationships that work very differently from the broad social webs that extroverts often maintain.

A study published in Health Psychology Open found that for people with lower extraversion, the quality of close relationships, specifically lower loneliness and stronger support from friends and family, was more strongly linked to happiness than it was for extroverts. Not more friends. Better ones.

This tracks completely with my experience. I have a small number of people I genuinely trust. My wife. My brothers. A handful of friends scattered across time zones who I can call after months of silence and pick up exactly where we left off. That is the whole network. And it’s more than enough.

The mistake I made for years was measuring my social life against an extrovert standard and finding it lacking. Once I stopped doing that, I realised I wasn’t socially deficient. I was socially specific. There’s a real difference.

Deep thinking wasn’t a quirk, it was the skill

The introvert’s tendency toward long, uninterrupted reflection was something I spent years apologising for. In group settings, I’d be three topics behind everyone else because I was still processing the first one properly. In brainstorming sessions, I’d come up with nothing on the spot, then have a genuinely useful idea at 11pm while going for a run.

Turns out, that’s not a bug. Research cited by neuroscientist Friederike Fabritius on CNBC points to a Harvard study finding that introverts have thicker gray matter and show more activity in the frontal lobes, the areas responsible for analysis and rational thought. The introverted brain isn’t slower. It’s running deeper processes.

This is what built Hack Spirit. Not speed. Not charisma. Not a massive network of contacts. Just years of sitting with ideas, reading widely, thinking carefully, and writing in a way that tried to be genuinely useful rather than impressive. The deep thinking that I once considered my greatest social liability turned out to be the most valuable professional asset I had.

The things nobody told you to value

I’m not arguing that introversion is superior, or that extroverts have it wrong. The research is clear that social connection matters for everyone, introverts included. What I’m pushing back on is the advice that treats introversion itself as a problem to fix rather than a wiring to understand.

The things that actually moved my life forward weren’t the things I was encouraged to cultivate. They were the ones I kept having to defend. The long mornings alone with coffee and books. The careful, slow thinking before I committed to anything. The two or three friendships I tended properly instead of ten I maintained badly. The willingness to sit with my own discomfort in silence until it told me something useful.

There’s a line in Buddhist philosophy that has stuck with me for years: the idea that wisdom doesn’t come from accumulating more experience, but from paying better attention to the experience you already have. That’s an introvert’s natural orientation. Not a flaw. A starting point.

My daughter is about eight months old now. Tiny and extremely opinionated about sleep schedules. I don’t know yet whether she’ll be an introvert or an extrovert, or somewhere in the complicated middle most of us actually occupy. But I know what I’ll tell her when someone suggests she needs to be more like the room she’s in. That fitting a mould and finding your shape are two very different projects, and only one of them is actually worth doing.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.