How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

There was love in the home. We just didn’t express it.

I felt most alive when I was engaged in the solitary business of writing.

I felt painfully awkward during those moments when someone tried to connect with me. I inwardly wanted to connect. I just didn’t know what to say.

Repressing my own feelings became my default mode for moving through the world.

Becoming a father was an emotional revolution, of course.

But over the years I came to realize that living in a detached way is, in fact, a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but from yourself.

When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.

Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract.

Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.

Our schools and other institutions have focused more and more on preparing people for their careers, but not on the skills of being considerate toward the person next to you.

On social media you can have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere.

how to get better at treating people with consideration; how to get better at understanding the people right around us. I’ve come to believe that the quality of our lives and the health of our society depends, to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of daily life.

the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water.

You can’t make the big decisions in life well unless you’re able to understand others.

If you are going to marry someone, you have to know not just about that person’s looks, interests, and career prospects but how the pains of their childhood show up in their adulthood, whether their deepest longings align with your own.

In a 2021 study, McKinsey asked managers why their employees were quitting their firms. Most of the managers believed that people were leaving to get more pay. But when the McKinsey researchers asked the employees themselves why they’d left, the top reasons were relational. They didn’t feel recognized and valued by their managers and organizations. They didn’t feel seen.

Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own.

“Artificial intelligence is going to do many things for us in the decades ahead, and replace humans at many tasks, but one thing it will never be able to do is to create person-to-person connections. If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.”

If you beam the light of your attention on me, I blossom.

“The roots of resilience,” the psychologist Diana Fosha writes, “are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.”

Intriguingly, Ickes finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.

To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

“A lot of brilliant writers and thinkers don’t have any sense for how people operate,” the therapist and author Mary Pipher once told me. “To be able to understand people and be present for them in their experience—that’s the most important thing in the world.”

The size-up is what you do when you first meet someone: You check out their look, and you immediately start making judgments about them.

Fear is the enemy of open communication.

You may have heard the old story about a man by a river. A woman standing on the opposite shore shouts to him: “How do I get to the other side of the river?” And the man shouts back: “You are on the other side of the river!”

If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.

Some people formed a certain conception of you, one that may even have been largely accurate at some point in time. But then you grew up. You changed profoundly. And those people never updated their models to see you now for who you really are.

Each person is a fathomless mystery, and you have only an outside view of who they are.

You can be loved by a person yet not be known by them.

A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger.

The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.

When Jimmy sees a person, he comes in with the belief that this person is so important that Jesus was willing to die for their sake.

Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic.

A great way to mis-see people is to see only a piece of them. Some doctors mis-see their patients when they see only their bodies. Some employers mis-see workers when they see only their productivity. We must resist every urge to simplify in this way.

Palmer is saying that the way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become.

Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others. Moral behavior happens continuously throughout the day, even during the seemingly uneventful and everyday moments.

Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings.

Being a therapist, she argues, is less about providing solutions and more “a way of paying attention, which is the purest form of love.”

Gabriel Rolón

“In therapy, as in life, point of view is everything,” Pipher writes in her book Letters to a Young Therapist. In her practice, she projects a happy realism. The old grand masters of her field, like Freud, saw people driven by dark drives, repressions, and competitive instincts, but Pipher, who cut her professional teeth as a waitress, sees vulnerable, love-seeking people sometimes caught in bad situations. She tries to inhabit each person’s point of view and see them, sympathetically, as those who are doing the best they can. Her basic viewpoint is charitable to all comers.

“While families are imperfect institutions, they are also our greatest source of meaning, connection, and joy,”

Nothing can be heard in the mind until the situation feels safe and familiar to the body.

Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life.