How to Know a Person by David Brooks
Oh. This made me cry. A couple of times. I think that is because a) it is a good book and it can do that to you, and b) just in one of those moods right now. As we will discover.
Flyability
Sydney Singapore. That’s all it took. Did sleep a bit. Had some scran. But mainly just head in book. It is one that you just want to get through. It does meander a bit from the title topic as you get into it, but you forgive it as its still a wonderfully written book.
Quotes
Not sure this is attributed to anyone:
‘“Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”’1
Plenty of things I know of these days where the theory says no, but reality says yes. And reality gets the final, casting vote. Its a bit like this:
‘If its stupid and it works it ain’t stupid.’
Plenty of stupid things I know that work an absolute treat.
David Brooks talking about himself:
‘But when it came to spontaneous displays of emotion, I had the emotional capacity of a head of cabbage.’2
Again, I know plenty of people who have cabbage where the emotional stuff should be. Which is sad. As I’d expect being able to self-reflect, and see what you are doing to others should be a standard operating trait of being human. Or perhaps I am actually in the matrix and their AI is glitchy. Or they just don’t have the curiosity to question themselves or read books like this…I just don’t know.
As the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once wrote:
‘One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way—said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.’3
A piece of deepness Aldous Huxley captured the core reality:
‘“Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”’4
And this one; as the writer Anaïs Nin put it:
‘“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”’5
But this is the cracker quote:
‘No crueler punishment can be devised than to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible. “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.’6
What is worse than actually being ignored? You ask for help. Ignored. You are told to engage with someone to get things done. Ignored. Then you continue to be ignored with a pointed ‘Not my responsibility’ response. Which is ignoring of a new level. I can’t even be bothered to tell you how to fix this, that is how much you don’t matter.
Well I actually think there is something worse than being ignored. Its being ignored and then blamed, pointed at, for your reaction at being ignored. Like I said. In a mood.
Ah ha moments
Brooks talks about how people diminish others. How they don’t try to know a person. The headline ways are:
Egotism
Anxiety
Naïve Realism
The Lesser Minds Problem
Objectivism
Essentialism
The Static Mindset
Very informative. And of course if you want to find out more, go read the book :).
But the one example is of 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. People in the grip of naïve realism are so locked into their own perspective, they can’t appreciate that other people have very different perspectives. You may have heard the old story about a man by a river. 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!”’7
Who isn’t guilty of projecting what you are feeling, seeing, reasoning, onto others? It’s back to being ignored. If you aren’t seen, how can your realism be comprehended by others?
And too often I, we, all, are guilty of this:
‘Let others voluntarily evolve. I wish I had understood then that trust is built when individual differences are appreciated, when mistakes are tolerated, and when one person says, more with facial expressions than anything else, “I’ll be there when you want me. I’ll be there when the time is right.”’8
Not having the patience to let people get there under their own steam and time. Yes, some don’t. Many do.
As well, the old adage of perception is reality is being shown as true:
‘Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person “constructionism.” Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”’9
And on this book goes…
Five Stars
…which is why this is an excellent five star book.
96 highlights and 15 bookmarks are in my Kindle for this book. What is above is just a tiny amount of what I thought were worthy of wisdom, and if I wanted to copy 7.71% of the book to Substack that is what would happen if all my highlights and bookmarks were added.
Instead I’d say go buy and read this book. Then read it again.
I honestly think this is up there with Radical Candor as a book about people and life that is worth a regular re-read.
And this is just a simple picture of someone who doesn’t ignore me:
P. 4.
P. 5.
P. 36.
P. 61.
P. 62.
P. 9.
P. 20.
P. 51-52.
P. 64-65.
Great review! Thank you for the recommendation