He wore a mask of certainty for decades—until it nearly cost him everything.

Author Benjamin Plumb's life reads like an introvert's worst nightmare: terror during US Army field training, fear during enemy night attacks in Vietnam, forced extroversion at the Harvard Business School, chaos during economic collapse in Chile, and shock from an extortion attempt by Manuel Noriega in Panama.

In The Satisfied Introvert—part gripping memoir, part practical self-help book—Plumb tells the story of how he tried and failed to endure these and other pressures by clinging to a carefully crafted persona.

Plumb recognized he was an introvert at age four, when he ran away from home to escape his talkative mother. By age ten, like most introvert children, he had devised a "winning recipe"—a protective mask built to succeed in an extroverted world. But like almost all such recipes, it brought anxiety and a life of performing instead of living.

Through raw personal storytelling and structured reflection, Plumb shows how "winning recipes" prevent introverts from being authentic. The mask of his own recipe—an obsession with process and certainty—brought him academic acclaim, yet eventually led to personal ruin.

What changed everything was learning to live without the mask.

Inside The Satisfied Introvert . . .