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

by David Brooks

Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey, as they go about making their own kind of music.

I want to receive you as an active creator. I want to understand how you construct your point of view. I want to ask you how you see things. I want you to teach me about the enduring energies of old events that shape how you see the world today.

If a person is a point of view, then to know them well you have to ask them how they see things.

Asking good questions can be a weirdly vulnerable activity. You’re admitting that you don’t know. An insecure, self-protective world is a world with fewer questions.

A 2012 study by Harvard neuroscientists found that people often took more pleasure from sharing information about themselves than from receiving money.

The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020.

In a sense, American culture became demoralized.

Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot about the sitter—the way he shifts his weight and moves—whereas the sitter may not be aware that the sat-on person is even there.

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

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.

Brackett reports that when you ask people in public where they are on the mood meter, almost everybody will say they are having positive emotions. When you ask people in confidential surveys where they are, 60 to 70 percent will put themselves on the negative-emotion side of the mood meter. That result is haunting, because it suggests that many of the people you meet, who seem fine on the surface, are actually suffering within.

people are eager, often desperate, to be seen, heard, and understood. And yet we have built a culture, and a set of manners, in which that doesn’t happen.

experimentation. In one study, for example, McAdams asked a group of college students to list the ten key scenes in their life. When he asked the same students the same question three years later, only 22 percent of the scenes were repeated on the second list. The students were in the early process of understanding the plot of their lives, so they had come up with a different list of episodes that really mattered.

Most of us endure narrative crises from time to time—periods in which something happened so that your old life story no longer makes sense.

wisdom is not mostly a trait possessed by an individual. Wisdom is a social skill practiced within a relationship or a system of relationships.