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

by David Brooks

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Most people know that fear plays some role in their life, but they haven’t clearly defined how fear is holding them back. “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?” “If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?” “If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?” “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?”

“Why is that a problem for you?”

In 2013, Americans spent an average of six and a half hours per week with friends. By 2019, they were spending only four hours per week with friends, a 38 percent drop. By 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic was easing, they were spending only two hours and forty-five minutes per week with friends, a 58 percent decline.

As Van der Kolk writes, “Knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and…being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse.”

Distrust sows distrust. It creates a feeling that the only person you can count on is yourself. Distrustful people assume that others are out to get them, they exaggerate threats, they fall for conspiracy theories that explain the danger they feel.

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

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

hard conversations are hard because people in different life circumstances construct very different realities. It’s not only that they have different opinions about the same world; they literally see different worlds.

People with heavy backpacks see steeper hills than people without backpacks, because it is harder for people with backpacks to walk up them.

A hunter with a gun will see a much bigger field than a hunter with a spear because he has a much wider range of action. A police officer who is holding a gun is more likely to “see” other people holding guns than he would if he were holding a shoe, which is partly why 25 percent of police shootings involve unarmed suspects.

Proffitt and Baer hammer home the point: “We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”

If you and I are out with a group contemplating a hike up a mountain, different members of the group are literally seeing different mountains, depending on how fit or unfit we are.

Rich people walk into Neiman Marcus and see a different store than poor people do, because rich people actually have the capacity to buy things in that store.

He seemed, outwardly, like the person in my circle least likely to be afflicted by a devastating depression, with a cheerful disposition, a happy marriage, a rewarding career, and two truly wonderful sons, Owen and James. But he was carrying more childhood pain than I knew, and eventually the trauma overtook him.

The famous Grant Study followed 268 Harvard men from their days as college students in the 1940s until their deaths many decades later, in an attempt to discover the patterns of human development and achievement. The study found—and this was a surprise decades ago—that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.

People who have Botox injections and can’t furrow their brow are less able to perceive another person’s worry because they can’t physically reenact it.

The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.

Highly empathic people, on the other hand, enjoy deeper relationships, exhibit more charitable behavior toward those around them, and, according to some studies, show higher degrees of nonconformity and social self-confidence.

Psychologists recommend that you ask your friend to fill in the blanks to these two statements: “In our family, the one thing you must never do is _____” and “In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ________.” That’s a way to help a person see more clearly the deep values that were embedded in the way they were raised.

The Big Five traits are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness.

people who score high in extroversion are highly drawn to all positive emotions.

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.

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. These can be small, like learning to surf, or larger, like serving as an apprentice to a plumber.

The person who seems strongest in any family or organization can also feel alone.

Wisdom at this phase of life is the ability to see the connections between things. It’s the ability to hold opposite truths—contradictions and paradoxes—in the mind at the same time, without wrestling to impose some linear order. It’s the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.

This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”

Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”

We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal.

I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.” That prompts a story.

By the way, the people who address themselves in the second or even the third person have less anxiety, give better speeches, complete tasks more efficiently, and communicate more effectively. If you’re able to self-distance in this way, you should.

One day, on the set of the movie Suicide Squad, the actor Will Smith went up to Viola Davis and asked her who she was. She didn’t quite get the question, so Smith clarified: “Look, I’m always going to be that fifteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend broke up with him. That’s always going to be me. So, who are you?” Davis replied, “I’m the little girl who would run after school every day in third grade because these boys hated me because I was…not pretty. Because I was…Black.”

I’m always intrigued by people who see their lives as a surfing story: I caught a wave and rode it, then I caught another wave. Then another.

The seventeenth-century French moralist François de La Rochefoucauld issued the crucial warning here: “We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we often end up by disguising ourselves from ourselves.”

Frequently the goal of therapy is to help the patient tell a more accurate story, a story in which the patient is seen to have power over their own life. They craft a new story in which they can see themselves exercising control.

We live our childhoods at least twice. First, we live through them with eyes of wonderment, and then later in life we have to revisit them to understand what it all meant.

So when I see you, I want to see back into the deep sources of your self. That means asking certain key questions: Where’s home? What’s the place you spiritually never leave? How do the dead show up in your life? How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? How do I see you transmitting your culture? How do I see you rebelling against your culture? How do I see you caught between cultures?

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle.

The really good confidants—the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale.

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

The Buddhists have a useful phrase for unconditional positive regard: “idiot compassion,” which is the kind of empathy that never challenges people’s stories or threatens to hurt their feelings.

Now when I’m reading a novel I ask, What is the relationship at the center of this book? With good novels there will generally be one such central relationship, or perhaps a few core relationships will drive everything else.

It is the simple capacity to make another person feel seen and understood—that hard but essential skill that makes a person a treasured co-worker, citizen, lover, spouse, and friend.