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

by David Brooks

Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.

“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.”

I don’t have to tell you how delicious that moment felt—warm, intimate, profound. It was the bliss of human connection.

The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

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

“Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?”

If I approach you in this respectful way, I’ll know that you are not a puzzle that can be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of.

Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.

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

Small talk and just casually being around someone is a vastly underappreciated stage in the process of getting to know someone.

I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.”

It’s a great talent—to be someone others consider lingerable.

We do this because people are more fully human when they are at play.

play isn’t an activity; it’s a state of mind.

If I’d been better schooled back then in the art of accompaniment, I would have understood how important it is to honor another person’s ability to make choices.

Let others voluntarily evolve.

Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold.

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

Each mind is relentlessly remaking itself.

People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”

Sometimes things that are hard to live through are very satisfying to remember.

Sometimes we can’t understand personal truths until we hear ourselves say them.

Asking good questions can be a weirdly vulnerable activity. You’re admitting that you don’t know.

Sometimes a broad, dumb question is better than a smart question, especially one meant to display how well-informed you are.

Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their life from a distance.

People are longing to be asked questions about who they are.

As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted.

For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy.

The essence of evil is the tendency to obliterate the humanity of another.

When those of us in positions of power in the establishment media and the larger cultural institutions of society tell stories that don’t include you, it is disorienting and disenfranchising. It is as if you look into society’s mirror and find that you are not there.

You can’t get to know another person while pretending not to see ideology, class, race, faith, identity, or any of the other fraught social categories.

every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The official conversation is represented by the words we say about whatever topic we are nominally discussing: politics, economics, workplace issues—whatever. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk.

The authors of Crucial Conversations also remind us that every conversation exists within a frame: What is the purpose here? What are our goals?

When somebody is talking to you about pain in their life, even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to your frame. Your first job is to stay within the other person’s standpoint to more fully understand how the world looks to them. Your next job is to encourage them to go into more depth about what they have just said.

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

in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

Slapping a label on someone is a great way to render them invisible and destroy a hard conversation.

You break the momentum by asking the other person, “How did we get to this tense place?”

How you see a situation depends on what you are capable of doing in a situation.

“We project our individual mental experience into the world, and thereby mistake our mental experience to be the physical world, oblivious to the shaping of perception by our sensory systems, personal histories, goals, and expectations,”

Everybody wants to be heard. Most people are willing to make an extra effort to be kind, considerate, and forgiving when you give them the chance.

There was an exuberant goofballism about him.

you sense how as children they must have felt illuminated by love.

the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.

The big thing your models do is help you see your life as a story in which you are the hero. We seek out the people, the articles, and the books that confirm our models.

if you find what is sacred to a person, there you will find “rampant irrationality.”

Your mind hides most of your thinking so you can get on with life.

Introspection isn’t the best way to repair your models; communication is.

“The most important part of your life is ahead of you, not behind you. I’m proud to know you and proud of everything you’ve accomplished and will accomplish.”