I really wish people could ditch the "introvert vs. extrovert" framing. As a label, it is not helpful for anyone's personal growth. People think salespeople ar

I really wish people could ditch the "introvert vs. extrovert" framing. As a label, it is not helpful for anyone's personal growth. People think salespeople are some kind of natural "extrovert". I hate to break it to you, but cold calling is draining for everyone. Salespeople may get particularly good at reducing the emotional expenditure involved in making cold calls, to be able to making a lot of them for long periods, but it is fundamentally a practice where one expends energy out into the world and gets absolutely nothing in return. I promise you, any salesperson making cold calls with no "nibbles on the line" eventually begins to doubt themselves and looks to make an exit. This is also why online dating is so draining for so many people, despite applications not inducing any "social interaction" like actual conversation - if you invest emotional energy into something that does not return emotional energy to you, then you will drain yourself if you are not careful. On the other end of the spectrum, there are specific, individual people in our lives who fill us with energy and joy, who we love to spend time with. These are people we "vibe" with, who are on our wavelength, so to speak. When you have someone, maybe even more than one, such person in your life, I doubt you would like to spend less time with them. Social skills are about finding more people who give you energy and resisting people who drain your energy. Finding more people who give you energy is, yes, a cold-calling skill, one where you take the risk of investing, from time to time, a small and limited amount of energy in the universe in the hope of finding a social energy return. But it is also about resisting people who drain your energy. Sometimes we need to interact with people in our families or at work who we can't just cut out of our lives, for one reason or another, who drain us. One can hardly be faulted for not having the energy, at the end of the day, to go network at some social function when they're already drained. But it is also that person's responsibility to learn to manage their emotional energy so that they will have some for the cold-calling that is necessary to find the people we vibe with. You do not need to vibe with everyone, and framing people with really good cold-calling skills as "extroverts" avoids the fact that such people do not actually vibe with everyone, they are just better at both the cold-calling skills involved as well as managing their emotional energy levels.