How to Know a Person - by David Brooks

Published: June 21, 2024

How to Know a Person - by David Brooks

Read: 2024-06-21

Recommend: 4/10

Many parts of the paper feel like study notes, filled with numerous quotes and stories from other books. I found the first few chapters more engaging than the later ones.

Notes

Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:

When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.
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. They are so involved with themselves that other people are just not on their radar screen. Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know what to look for and how to ask the right questions at the right time. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.
We all go through our days awash in social ignorance. William Ickes, a leading scholar on how accurate people are at perceiving what other people are thinking, finds that strangers who are in the midst of their first conversation read each other accurately only about 20 percent of the time and close friends and family members do so only 35 percent of the time.
A woman standing on the opposite shore shouts to him: “How do I get to the other side of the river?” And the man shouts back: “You are on the other side of the river!”
Essentialists are quick to use stereotypes to categorize vast swaths of people. Essentialism is the belief that certain groups actually have an “essential” and immutable nature.
Vivian and Bess are belligerents locked in a struggle over where the blame is going to lie.
I’ve never seen a person’s whole aspect transformed so suddenly. The old, stern disciplinarian face she’d put on under my gaze vanished, and a joyous, delighted nine-year-old girl appeared. By projecting a different quality of attention, Jimmy called forth a different version of her. Jimmy is an Illuminator.
When you’re practicing Illuminationism, you’re offering a gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.” It’s a gaze that positively answers the question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?”
If I approach you in this respectful way, I’ll know that you are not a puzzle that can be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of. I’ll do you the honor of suspending judgment and letting you be as you are. Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.
some of the qualities that make it hard to see others: egotism, anxiety, objectivism, essentialism, and so on.
Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”
there are two layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer.
A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (In fact, that’s a bad conversation.) A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.
Active listening, on the other hand, is an invitation to express. One way to think of it is through the metaphor of hospitality. When you are listening, you are like the host of a dinner party. You have set the scene. You’re exuding warmth toward your guests, showing how happy you are to be with them, drawing them closer to where they want to go. When you are speaking, you are like a guest at a dinner party. You are bringing gifts.
Like a good improv comedian, a good conversationalist controls her impatience and listens to learn, rather than to respond.
As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett puts it, “Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”
“I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my Steven.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself. You’re saying, in effect, “Your problems aren’t that interesting to me; let me tell you about my own, much more fascinating ones.” If you want to build a shared connection, try sitting with their experience before you start ladling out your own.
“Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.” Because the moderator asked an open question, the unassuming woman felt empowered to go way beyond the narrow topic of grocery stores and tell us something about her pleasures and her wider life.
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.
One problem with anger, for example, is that it has to find things to attach itself to. Angry people are always in search of others they can be angry at.
Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.
To know a person well, you have to know who they were before they suffered their losses and how they remade their whole outlook after them. If a subtext of this book is that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you, then one of the subsequent lessons is that to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared? To be a good friend and a good person you have to know how to accompany someone through this process.
The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It’s going back over your work so you can change and improve it.
people who score high in extroversion can be quick to anger. They take more risks and are more likely to die in traffic accidents. They are more likely to abuse alcohol in adolescence and less likely to save for retirement. Extroverts live their lives as a high-reward/high-risk exercise.
when people in our WEIRD culture get married, they tend to go off and set up their own separate household. But that is the dominant pattern in only 5 percent of the twelve hundred societies that have been studied. We often live in nuclear families. That’s the dominant family mode in only 8 percent of human societies. We have monogamous marriages. That’s predominant in only 15 percent of societies.
This is what our friends do for us. They not only delight us and call forth our best; friends also hold up a mirror so we can see ourselves in ways that would not otherwise be accessible. When we see ourselves that way, we have the opportunity to improve, to become our fuller selves.