Lesson 2 Embracing Our Differences
Opposite Personalities, Great Partnerships
Everybody is unique. However, there have been many ____ to categorize people’s personalities.
One of the most common methods divides people into two types, introverts and ____.
According to this division, introverts tend to be drawn to the internal world of ____ and feelings, while extroverts are drawn to the external world of people and activities.
Introverts recharge their ____ by spending some time alone; extroverts need to recharge when they do not socialize enough.
____ are good at performing tasks under pressure and coping with multiple jobs at once.
____, on the other hand, like to focus on one task at a time and can concentrate very well.
Extroverts tend to do assignments quickly. They make fast ____ and are comfortable with taking risks.
Introverts ____ work more slowly and deliberately.
They think before they act, give up less easily, and ____ more accurately.
Based on all this information, you might think that introverts and extroverts do not ____ along.
However, they actually work well together because their personalities complement ____ other.
____ they can even accomplish great things when they collaborate.
____ take a look at some famous examples!
Try as we ____, we cannot stay young forever.
Although this is a truth everyone ____, the thought of becoming old is usually the furthest thing from our minds.
That’s why we rarely pay attention to the physical changes that make everyday life challenging for the elderly or the financial difficulties they ____ experience after retirement.
Many of us consider these problems irrelevant to our lives, so we have ____ understanding of what it means to be old.
In order to understand the elderly more, 27-year-old Regina Martin and ____ Trent Bowman decided to participate in a TV documentary called Switching Ages.
For one month, they transformed themselves into old ____.
In addition to learning how to walk and talk like ____ in their seventies,
Regina and Trent also spent five ____ every morning putting on make-up to look older.
They even wore heavy body suits and ____ lenses that hindered their movements and eyesight.
Finally, they wore fake teeth and gray wigs to ____ their aged looks.
Their amazing ____, however, were only the tip of the iceberg of the transformation they would experience.
Case One: Working Together for Civil Rights
On December 1, 1955, in the American ____ of Montgomery, Alabama, a black woman named Rosa Parks got on a bus.
At that time in Montgomery, buses were divided ____ two zones: one for black people and the other for white people.
She took a seat in the ____ zone and watched quietly as more and more passengers got on the bus.
Soon, all the seats in the white zone were ____.
Then the ____ ordered her to give her seat to a white passenger.
Rosa Parks was a shy, ____ introvert.
She avoided standing out in public or drawing ____ to herself.
However, she had the courage to resist ____, so she answered calmly with a single word—“No.”
The ____ driver called the police, and she was arrested.
Parks’s calm response to the situation impressed many ____.
Soon after, her quiet resistance came together with the inspirational speechmaking of ____ Luther King Jr.
When 5,000 people assembled at a rally to support Parks’s act of courage, ____ made a speech to the crowd.
He was an extrovert — ____, sociable, and good at motivating people.
“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled,” he told ____.
“There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed ____ of the sunlight.”
King was an ____ speaker, and his words filled the people with pride and hope.
He then praised Parks’s ____ and hugged her. She stood silently.
Her mere ____ was enough to strengthen the crowd.
Rosa Parks’s act and Martin Luther ____ Jr.’s speech inspired Montgomery’s black community to boycott the buses, a crucial turning point in the struggle for civil rights.
The ____ lasted for 381 days.
It was a ____ time for everyone, but eventually the buses were integrated.
Think about how the partnership of these ____ people accomplished this.
A powerful ____ refusing to give up his seat on a bus would not have had the same effect.
Similarly, Rosa Parks ____ not have excited the crowd at the rally with her words.
When their introverted and extroverted traits were combined, however, his charisma attracted attention to her quiet ____.
In the end, this partnership had a huge impact on ____.
Regina Martin has been a passionate dance ____ for the past three years.
Although she is still a few years away from ____ 30, Regina is starting to feel even more pressure to retain her looks.
She obsessively ____ care of her body and always eats healthy food.
She has a strong fear of her youth disappearing and ____ uncomfortable around old people, to the point where she is unwilling to visit her 81-year-old grandmother.
On the first day of her challenge, Regina ____ only stare at her transformed self in disbelief.
After a few minutes, Regina sighed and said, “This ____ face doesn’t look nice.”
Later Regina was sent to a tiny flat in a retirement ____, where she spent several days enduring solitude and gradually adapted to living alone.
As part of the experiment, Regina worked at a ____ store that many elderly people visit.
Thinking that they would be boring and stuffy, she was reluctant to ____ conversations with them at first.
However, she soon ____ it very enjoyable to talk with them.
She met older ____ who still enjoyed bike riding and others who liked playing video games.
At her retirement complex, Regina joined a ____ group, and she was surprised to find that older people could still fall in love and suffer from broken hearts.
Her new ____ continued to grow stronger over the next couple of weeks, and she began to feel as if she were their peer.
As time went on, Regina started feeling ____ for deceiving them.
She decided to come clean about her real age to her ____ closest elderly friends, Susan and Charlotte, a week before the challenge was over.
She worried that they might feel betrayed after her confession, but they just laughed it off and shared some ____ tips with her to help her enjoy her youth more.
At the end of the ____, Regina said, “I don’t look at the elderly in the same way that I used to anymore.
I have realized how ____ I was. I couldn’t see that old people are just like me.
____ I can look past their gray hair and wrinkles and see the young people inside them.
Instead of worrying about my looks fading, I’m now fully embracing the ____ of growing old.”
Case Two: A Business Partnership
On June 29, 1975, Steve Wozniak tapped a few keys on his keyboard, and letters appeared on a ____.
He had just created a personal ____ that allowed people to type on a keyboard and see the results on a monitor simultaneously.
At the sight of the brilliant device, Steve Jobs ____ to Wozniak that they start a business.
Wozniak was a great ____.
When he partnered with ____, however, he was able to do much more.
In fact, the two ____ formed one of the most famous partnerships of the digital era.
Wozniak would come up with a clever engineering idea, and Jobs would find a way to ____, package, and sell it.
The two men had opposite ____. Wozniak hated small talk and often worked alone.
It was these features of his introverted personality that enabled ____ to focus on inventing things.
Jobs, on the other hand, ____ outstanding social skills.
According to Wozniak, he was good at communicating with ____.
Wozniak was a shy inventor, whereas Jobs was a daring entrepreneur, but they were alike in that neither was afraid to ____ challenges that seemed impossible.
So which personality type is better? Obviously, the ____ is neither.
The ____ needs both introverts and extroverts, and they often make a terrific team.
We simply need to respect different personalities as well as our ____.
Then, when we have a ____ to work together, we might be able to do great things!
Before participating in this documentary, Trent had ____ very little interaction with elderly people except for his 77-year-old grandfather.
He enjoyed his day-to-day life without worry and thought it quite satisfying to ____ in his parents’ house.
During the weekdays, Trent would spend his time ____ part-time at a restaurant.
On the weekends, he would ____ basketball or go shopping with his friends.
In short, Trent had little ambition and little ____ saved up for the furture, but he didn’t care.
As he only lived in the present, Trent never thought about ____ old.
He just ____ the elderly as a strange tribe that he would never join.
Spending a month fully disguised as a 72-year-old ____ was much more life-changing than Trent could have ever imagined.
He could finally see for himself what it was like to ____ as a senior citizen in society.
Early in the experiment, Trent tried to get on a bus to go ____.
Due to the special body suit and lenses, he had trouble climbing up the stairs of the ____.
Then a person ____ behind him started rushing him, expressing annoyance.
In his hurry to step onto the ____, Trent almost fell on the stairs.
He was astonished to see the disrespectful attitude ____ old people and the way they were treated.
Later he visited the restaurant ____ he once worked, but he noticed that no one paid much attention to him.
People acted as if he ____ there.
Trent started to realize ____ it felt like to be invisible.