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

by David Brooks

Yes, I’m the guy who had his life changed by a panel discussion.

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

I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower.

Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being.

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 embrac...

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.

And all these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through. There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: 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.

invisible. “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them:

Over the past four years I’ve become determined to learn the skills that go into seeing others, understandings others, making other people feel respected, valued, and safe.

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.”

Second, I wanted to learn this skill for what I think of as...

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

national survival.

Our social skills are currently inadequate

Black people

rural people

depressed young people

privileged people

needs, husbands and wives in brok...

Many of our big national problems arise from the fraying of...

If we want to begin repairing the big national ruptures, we have to learn to d...

Diminishers

Illuminators.

Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people.

They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.

the story that is sometimes told of Jennie Jerome, who later became Winston Churchill’s mother.

she dined with the British statesman William Gladstone and left thinking he was the cleverest person in England.

Later she dined with Gladstone’s great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, and left that dinner thinking she was the cleverest person in England. It’s nice to be like Gla...

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

The purpose of this book is to help us become more skilled at the art of seeing others and making them feel seen, heard, and understood.

Psychologists

Actors

Biogr...

Tea...

Skilled talk show and pod...

nursing, the ministry, management, social work, marketing, journalism, editing, HR, and on and on.

gradually realized

it’s a way of life.

I’m hoping this book will help you adopt a different posture toward other people,

different way of being present with people,

different way of having bigger co...

Living this way can yield the deepe...

What I saw, or felt I saw, was the wholeness of her.

slowly grown an intuitive sense for how that person feels and responds.

wasn’t seeing her, I was seeing out from her.

“beholding.”