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

by David Brooks

Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water. No crueler punishment can be devised than to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible. “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” To do that is to say: You don’t matter. You don’t exist.

If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.”

THE STATIC MINDSET. 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.

GENEROSITY. Dr. Ludwig Guttmann was a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 and found a job in a hospital in Britain that served paraplegics, mostly men injured in the war.

Politics seems to offer a comprehensible moral landscape. We, the children of light, are facing off against them, the children of darkness. Politics seems to offer a sense of belonging. I am on the barricades with the other members of my tribe. Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible.

Thinking bout this in a new light after the recent election

And here’s where victimhood turns into villainy. The ones who become mass shooters decide that they are supermen and it is the world that is full of ants.

which my favorites include High Conflict by Amanda Ripley, I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán, and, especially, Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.

The first thing I learned is that prior to entering into any hard conversation, it’s important to think about conditions before you think about content.

Slapping a label on someone is a great way to render them invisible and destroy a hard conversation. Micah Goodman, who teaches at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, once told me, “A great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong. A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you.”

Then you do something the experts call “splitting.” Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are.

“You and I have very different ideas of what marketing plan this company should pursue. But we both believe in the product we are selling. We both want to get it before as many people as possible. I think we are both trying to take this company to the next level.”

I learned, very gradually, that a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect, and love them; it’s to show them you haven’t given up on them, you haven’t walked away.

At level three people avoid social encounters when possible because it is so hard for them. Small talk is exhausting and unpredictable. At level four people can interact easily with others but they do not like it when the conversation shifts to emotional or personal topics.

CONTACT THEORY. Decades ago, the psychologist Gordon Allport built on the obvious point that it’s hard to hate people close up. He found that bringing hostile groups together really does increase empathy in each group.

If you really want your children to be more empathetic, get them involved in their school’s drama program. Playing another character is a powerful way to widen your repertoire of perspectives.

“There were many times when we felt blessed. It was as though certain death had granted us an extra life.”

C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats.

People who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models. People who grow try to accommodate what happened in order to create new models.

The act of remaking your models is hard. Not everyone does it successfully. When Joseph surveyed people who had experienced train bombings and other terrorist attacks, he found that 46 percent reported that their view of life had changed for the worse, and 43 percent said their view of life had changed for the better. The journey of reconsideration and re-formation often involves taking what Stephen Cope, learning from Carl Jung, calls “the night sea journey,” heading off into the parts of yourself that are “split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out.”

The essential moral act in this model of character formation is self-mastery. It is exercising willpower so that you are the master of your passions and not their slave.

The Illuminator ideal begins with a different understanding of human nature. People are social animals. People need recognition from others if they are to thrive. People long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance. Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.”

Thesis… sort of buried.

But the Illuminator is not just there to see the depths of your pain, she’s there to see your strength, to celebrate with you in your triumphs. How do you see and recognize the gifts other people bring to the world? That is the subject of the final section of this book.

The Democrats had decided they couldn’t support it. “I’m sorry, Governor,” Bullock said at one point, “but I’m going to have to fuck you on this one.” The room fell silent, the atmosphere tense and awkward. Bush stood up, walked over to Bullock, grabbed him by the shoulders, and kissed him on the lips. “What the hell did you do that for,” Bullock asked, wiping off his lips. “If you’re going to fuck me,” Bush replied, “you’ll have to kiss me first.” The room erupted in laughter.

In general, people get better as they age. They become more agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable versions of themselves. If you have that sommelier’s expertise in the human personality, you can see people more clearly as, like wine, they improve with age.

THE IMPERIAL TASK Pretty early in life, sometime

They want to win praise, achieve glory. Whether it’s in sports or schoolwork or music or something else, they crave other people’s positive judgments about their own value.

We tolerate this somewhat self-centered consciousness in kids and teenagers, but sometimes the imperial consciousness carries on into adulthood. An adult who has never left this mindset behind experiences his days as a series of disjointed contests he wants to win. Whether in business, pickup basketball, or politics, he has an intense desire to see himself as a winner, and a touchy pride that causes him to react strongly against any sign of disrespect.

A person embedded in this task, and the imperial consciousness that emerges to help people complete it, probably doesn’t have a rich internal life. He’s not going for self-knowledge; he’s trying to make his presence impressive to the world. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin strike me as men who experienced an imperial consciousness in childhood, and then never moved beyond it.

Kegan writes that at this moment the person goes from being physical to being metaphysical. She sees not only what is but also the ideal of what might be. Teenage idealism can be intense but also dogmatic and unforgiving. The purpose of idealism, at this moment of consciousness, is not only to seek the common good; it’s also to help you bond more tightly with some group. I fight injustice because it makes me cool, helps me belong; that’s what superior people like us do.

Breakups, when we’re in the interpersonal phase, can feel particularly devastating. To lose a friend, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or a spouse is to lose your very self—the source of your approval and value.

Robert Caro has spent much of his life studying and writing about Lyndon Johnson. In his book Working, about the craft of being a biographer, he describes the furnaces of desire that gripped Johnson while he was a young congressional aide. Johnson would leave his basement room in the shabby hotel where he was staying and walk toward the U.S. Capitol Building. After a few blocks, the building would loom on the hill before him. He was so eager, so ambitious, that his pace would quicken and he would start running, winter or summer, up the hill and across the plaza to get to his office. People gawked at this awkward rushing figure, his long skinny arms and legs flapping all over the place. Running. The running was Johnson’s ambition in physical form.

People gripped by the career consolidation task are often driven by a desire for mastery—the intrinsic pleasure of becoming quite good at something. They get up in the morning and work their rut. There’s a big field to be farmed out there, the great project of their vocation, but each day they can only work their rut. When they do that, they have a sense of progress being made.

During this life task, intimacy motivation takes a step back and achievement motivation takes a step forward. 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.

suppress so many feelings. You can begin to see why most people eventually rebel against this consciousness. Career success fails to satisfy. The sense of self, which once seemed so exciting to build, now feels a little claustrophobic. People tire of following the formulas the world uses to define “success.” Sébastien Bras is the owner of Le Suquet, a restaurant in Laguiole, France, that earned three Michelin stars, the world’s highest culinary distinction, for eighteen consecutive years. Then one year he asked the Michelin folks to stop coming to his restaurant and never come back again. He’d realized that his desire to please the Michelin system had imposed tremendous pressure, crushing his creativity.

Carl Jung once wrote, “The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.” Eventually the costs become too high. The person at the end of this task realizes that there is a spiritual hunger that’s been unmet, a desire to selflessly serve some cause, to leave some legacy for others.

THE GENERATIVE TASK

The final task Erik Erikson wrote about was the struggle to achieve integrity or endure despair. Integrity is the ability to come to terms with your life in the face of death. It’s a feeling of peace that you have used and are using your time well. You have a sense of accomplishment and acceptance. Despair, by contrast, is marked by a sense of regret. You didn’t lead your life as you believe you should have. Despair involves bitterness, ruminating over past mistakes, feeling unproductive. People often evade and externalize their regret.

My hope is that this focus on life tasks can help remind that each person you meet is at one spot on their lifelong process of growth.

Chapter 14 alone made this book worth reading for me: a summary of “life tasks” from psychologists Kegan and Erickson.

Małgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl asked people to describe the characters they heard in their head. She found that people commonly named four types of inner voices: the Faithful Friend (who tells you about your personal strengths), the Ambivalent Parent (who offers caring criticism), the Proud Rival (who badgers you to be more successful), and the Helpless Child (who has a lot of self-pity).

Mental models on self talk

Other people view their lives as “Rags to Riches,” in which the hero starts out impoverished and obscure and rises to prominence. Or they see their lives as a “Quest,” a story in which the hero undertakes a voyage in pursuit of some goal and is transformed by the journey. There must be more than seven plots, but it’s probably true that every mentally healthy person has one overriding self-defining myth, even if they are only semi-aware of it.

Zora Neal Hurston was an ambitious woman who was always climbing upward, always exploring, always on the move.

help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along.