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

by David Brooks

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy.

And all these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through.

In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

“To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to be that guy.

the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other.

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

The Koreans call it nunchi, the ability to be sensitive to other people’s moods and thoughts. The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic.

“All families are a little crazy, but that is because all humans are a little crazy.”

Ninety percent of life is just going about your business.

A teacher could offer the answers, but he wants to walk with his students as they figure out how to solve a problem.

“Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

“How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

A study of Japanese businesspeople found that they are typically comfortable with eight-second pauses between one comment and another, roughly twice as long as Americans generally tolerate.

Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do.

There is no easy way to get even partly into this alternate reality; we can only try to persevere through a leap of faith, through endless flexibility, and through a willingness to be humble before the fact that none of this makes any sense.

Caring begins with the awareness that the other person has a consciousness that is different from my own.

By some strange unknown inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is creating.

Developing your character is like going to the gym—working through exercise and habit to strengthen a set of universal virtues: honesty, courage, determination, and humility.

If you want to understand another person, you have to be able to describe the particular energy they bring into a room.

They are excited by any chance to experience pleasure, to seek thrills, to win social approval.

If you follow extroverts on social media, you’ll see that their posts teem with comments like “Can’t wait!” “So excited!!” and “Love my life!!!”

Extroverts don’t have to be out with people all the time. They just are driven to powerfully pursue some sort of pleasure, some sort of positive reward.

Even though they are always ready to perceive danger, neurotics often enter into relationships with precisely those people who will threaten them.

Personality traits are not only gifts, they are gifts you can build over your lifetime.

if you want to understand someone well, you have to understand what life task they are in the middle of and how their mind has evolved to complete this task.

The psychologist Brian Little argues that people generally have on average fifteen “personal projects” going at any one time.

A person who is primarily interested in consolidating his career has a tendency, Kegan observes, to “seal up,” to become less open to deep relationships. Such a person also has a tendency to detach from his or her emotions.

The awareness of death tends to make life’s trivialities seem…trivial.

Wisdom is the ability to see deeply into who people are and how they should move in the complex situations of life.

Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions.

Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you.

“most people have their answers inside them, but they need a guide so they can hear themselves figure it out.”