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.

I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings, then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed human being.

“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.

In every crowd there are Diminishers and there are Illuminators. Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not as persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore.

NAÏVE REALISM. This is the assumption that the way the world appears to you is the objective view, and therefore everyone else must see the same reality you do.

They eventually agree that people were equally unhappy in both generations, but, Bess observes, “The unhappiness is so alive today.”4

Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

“The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

As Montaigne once observed, you can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom. There are certain things you simply have to live through in order to understand.

Some people tell you life stories that are just too perfect. There are never any random events; each episode of their life was, supposedly, masterfully planned in advance. Such people describe one triumph after another, one achievement after another in a way that’s just not real. “The only way you can describe a human being is by describing his imperfections,”15 the mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote. That goes for self-description, too.

if we conduct all our experiments using only WEIRD research subjects at Western universities, we shouldn’t use that data to draw wide conclusions about human nature in general.

“You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours,” the novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote, “but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours …. What you are is an expression of History.”