Rating:👂
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen is a book by David Brooks. The book is short and dense with insight. I finished it a month or so ago, but have been working on other stuff and am finally getting around to writing about it. It has made me think differently about what being a good friend and making deep connections means.
Brooks immediately downplays his own skills in this domain, claiming that he previously “had the emotional capacity of a head of cabbage”. He talks about his own journey towards improving his relationships and social skills, which is honestly a helpful beginning to the book, reminding readers that these are things that can be changed and improved.
Some interesting quotes:
- A 2012 study found that people often took more pleasure from sharing information about themselves than from receiving money
- Slapping a label on someone is a great way to render them invisible and destroy a hard conversation…a great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong. A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you
- If you hope to know someone well, you have to know something about the struggles and blessings of their childhoods and the defensive architecture they carry through life
- The psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that if you find what is sacred to a person, there you will find “rampant irrationality”
- 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 reader…it suggests that many people who seem fine on the surface are suffering within
- Ask your friend to fill in the blanks: “In our family, the one thing you must never do is ____”, and “In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ____”
- The Myers-Briggs test has no scientific validity. [The Big Five traits] has a ton of rigorous research behind it.
- Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think that they are finished
- Therapists are essentially story editors
- [How Jewish ancestors show up in our lives:] life is an audacious moral journey. Life asks a moral question: Have you lived up to the covenant?
- I missed the moment. There was a crucial moment in each conversation, and I did not have the presence of mind to pause the flow of talk so we could linger and go deep on what was just said
Rereading some of these a month after I’ve finished the book, I feel that I have been “missing the moment” more often than not recently - I’ve been very tired, which makes everything (including empathy and listening well) much harder.
This brief review is a good reminder to revisit some of this book’s ideas and continue striving to incorporate the best ones into my daily life.