How to know a person

My top 30 takeaways:

1. People skills are crucial to leading a satisfying life, yet today’s western society does not equip people with these skills.

2. We’re living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating.

3. There are both Diminishers and Illuminators in society. This book helps people learn how to be an Illuminator. Brooks quotes the biographer of E.M. Forster, who claimed, “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self”. Brooks notes that Illuminators bring the best out in others.

4. 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?”.

5. Data shows that the longer people are married, the less accurately they read each other. Couples tend to view their spouse through the lens of early experiences and memories without making allowances for the fact that they have grown and changed over time.

6. Most of us have all sorts of inborn proclivities that prevent us from perceiving others accurately such as anxiety, egotism, naïve realism, the lesser-mind problem, objectivism, essentialism, and static mindset.

7. Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking them a profound question about their philosophy of life.

8. Your senses give you a poor-quality, low-resolution snapshot of the world, and your brain is then forced to take that and construct a high-definition, feature-length movie. Notably, our memories can change over time. Our brains format our experiences to fit the life narrative we construct. This reality offers us hope if we need to refine and adjust our perspective as we gain fresh insights.

9. The average person speaks between 120-150 words per minute. The human brain works much faster, so people listening to others speak at that rate have time to spare. People are often tempted to multitask with their brain rather than listening intently to what the other person is saying.

10. 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.

11. Good conversationalists ask for stories about specific events or experiences, and then they go even further. They don’t only want to talk about what happened; they want to know how you experienced what happened. They want to understand what you were feeling when your boss told you that you were being laid off. Then a good conversationalist will ask how you’re experiencing now what you experienced then. In retrospect, was getting laid off a complete disaster, or did it send you off on a new path that you’re now grateful for?.

12. Some examples of questions that can invite interesting conversations:
    • “What crossroads are you at?”
    • “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
    • “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?”
    • “If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?”
    • “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?”

13. The crucial question is not “What happened to this person?” or “What are the items on their résumé?” Instead, we should ask: “How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.

14. We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. Try to compensate for that by asking questions about the positive sides of life: “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” “What’s working really well in your life?” “What are you most self-confident about?” “Which of your five senses is strongest?” “Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?” or “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?”.

15. The worst kinds of questions are the ones that don’t involve a surrender of power, that evaluate: Where did you go to college? What neighborhood do you live in? What do you do? They imply, “I’m about to judge you.”

16. Closed questions are also bad questions. Instead of surrendering power, the questioner is imposing a limit on how the question can be answered. For example, if you mention your mother and I ask, “Were you close?,” then I’ve limited your description of your relationship with your mother to the close/distant frame.

17. A third sure way to shut down conversations is to ask vague questions, like “How’s it going?” or “What’s up?” These questions are impossible to answer. They’re another way of saying, “I’m greeting you, but I don’t actually want you to answer.”

18. Many people are unable to step outside of their own points of view. They are simply not curious about other people.

19. People need to learn to get to know each other better. Between 1999-2019, the suicide rate in the United States rose by 33%. In one survey, 54% of Americans claimed that no one knew them well. Lonely people who feel unseen can become suspicious. Loneliness leads to meanness. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. Statistics suggest lonely people are seven times more likely to become involved in politics.

20. Love rejected comes back as hatred. In looking at mass shooters, someone concluded that, “They are not loners; they are failed joiners”. Our problem is fundamentally moral. As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect.

21. Our schools and other institutions have focused more and more on preparing people for their careers, but not on the skills of being considerate toward the person next to you. The humanities, which teach us what goes on in the minds of other people, have become marginalized.

22. People tend to craft their life story over a lifetime. In one survey, university students were instructed to identify the ten key scenes in their life. When asked to do the same exercise three years later, students included only 22% of the stories they had used the first time. As we age, we re-evaluate our life story and the importance of various moments.

23. Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working. Most of us construct more accurate and compelling stories as we age.

24. Very few of us sit down one day and write out the story of our lives and then go out and recite it when somebody asks. For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative. When you ask somebody to tell part of their story, you’re giving them an occasion to take that step back.

25. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your life and give your life meaning by turning the events into a coherent story. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of. And you can endure present pains only if you can see them as part of a story that will yield future benefits.

26. None of us can have an identity unless it is affirmed and acknowledged by others.

27. We live our childhoods at least twice. First, we live through them with eyes of wonderment, and then later in life we have to revisit them to understand what it all meant.

28. A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world.

29. The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality. Eventually the costs become too high.

30. The greatest thing a person does is to take the lessons of life, the hard knocks of life, the surprises of life, and the mundane realities of life and refine their own consciousness so that they can gradually come to see the world with more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity, and more grace.