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by
Patrick King
Read between
August 7 - October 26, 2025
This final point may ironically be the real key to unlocking other people—making sure we understand ourselves at a bare minimum before we turn our analytical gaze outward.
We live in a world of duality—dark exists because of light, we only understand up because of down, and what is high energy must eventually slow and stop. Simply understanding this principle can help us understand people, too. We are all a blend of complementary, connected, and interdependent forces. Like the yin yang, each gives rise to and balances the other.
Very astute and observant people know that what a person insults you with is often nothing more than the label they can’t acknowledge they actually give themselves.
The pleasure principle asserts that the human mind does everything it can to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. It doesn’t get simpler than that. In that simplicity, we find some of life’s most universal and predictable motivators.
People work harder to avoid pain than to get pleasure. While everyone wants pleasure as much as they can get it, their motivation to avoid pain is actually far stronger.
Our perceptions of pleasure and pain are more powerful drivers than the actual things.
Survival overrides everything. When our survival instinct gets activated, everything else in our psychological and emotional makeup turns off.
The next time you meet someone new or are trying to get a read on someone, consider looking at their actions in terms of the motivation of pleasure or pain. Ask yourself what good thing they gain by behaving as they do, or what bad thing they avoid—or both.
Natural, spontaneous, and genuine expressions of emotion tend to be symmetrical. Forced, fake, or conflicting expressions tend not to be. And again, try to interpret what you see in context,
Consider that communication started out nonverbally. In our earliest histories, before the development of language, humankind most likely communicated by gestures, simple sounds, and facial expressions.
Once you start looking, you’ll be amazed at the wealth of information that’s just waiting there to be noticed.
Sit back and let the other person volunteer information, rather than pulling it out of them. Don’t let on what you know too early—or at all.
Listen for stories that seem unusually long or detailed—liars use more words, and they may even talk more quickly.
Casual observation of body language, voice and verbal cues can help with understanding honest people, but we need more sophisticated techniques to help us detect liars.
Any politician, motivational speaker or marketing expert will tell you that the words you use make a massive difference. But what they do consciously and with intention is something many of us do unconsciously. Our word choice simply emerges from our deeper values, our personalities, our biases, expectations, beliefs, and attitudes.
Financial analyst Laura Rittenhouse believes that the more times the word “I” occurs in annual shareholder letters, the worse a company’s performance overall.
A person who insists on wearing fine jewelry and white shoes to a construction site, for example, is sending a clear message about their priorities and values.
Look at the general level of effort and care. Someone’s style may not be to your taste, but notice if they’ve made an effort or not. Lack of care and attention can signal low self-esteem or depression.
Famous Greek philosopher Aristotle once stated, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom,” and founding father of the United States of America Benjamin Franklin seemed to espouse similar thoughts: “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.”
What kind of prize would you work hardest for, and what punishment would you work hardest to avoid?
Where do you want to spend money, and where do you accept skimping on or skipping altogether?
Where your money goes is an important part of what makes you happy, so if you can pay attention to where you let it flow and where you cut it off, you’ll immediately know what matters to you on a daily basis.
What is your most personally significant and meaningful achievement and also your most meaningful disappointment or failure?
What is effortless and what is always exhausting?
If you could design a character in a game, what traits would you emphasize and which would you ignore?
What charity would you donate millions to if you had to?
What animal best describes you?
What’s your favorite movie?
What would you rescue from a fire in your home?
What scares you most?
What people say is often a poor indicator of what they want to convey, which makes people-reading a valuable life skill with almost endless benefits.
we become great people-readers when we understand ourselves. We need to know what biases, expectations, values, and unconscious drives we bring to the table so we are able to see things as neutrally and objectively as possible.
Any discussion on motivation must begin with the pleasure principle, which generally states that we move toward pleasure and move away from pain. If you think about it, this is omnipresent in our daily lives in both minuscule and huge ways. As such, this actually makes people more predictable to understand.
we come to defense of the ego. This is one of our most powerful motivators, but it is mostly unconscious. Simply put, we act to guard our ego from anything that would make us feel psychologically less.
