How to Know a Person by David Brooks

I finished this book in March 2025. I recommend this book 6/10.

Why you should read this book:

The book has a small section about being a better listener and focuses more on how to make people feel more noticed. It has examples of depression, suicide, and mass shootings. The book reminds you of the simple tools to pay attention to others but how difficult these tools are to master.

Get your copy here.

🚀 The book in three sentences

1. The steps are simple but hard to master.

2. Think like a midwife; you are here to assist the conversation, not giving birth yourself.

3. Just try to be there, to listen rather than fix, even in tough situations.

   
   

🎨 Impressions

This is a good book if you come across someone who is really struggling with depression or going through something really difficult.

📝 My notes and thoughts

• P13. A biographer of the novelist, E. M. Forster, wrote, "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." Imagine how good it would be to be that guy.

• P30. Some people walk into a room with an expression that is warm and embracing; others walk in looking cool and closed up. Some people first encounter others with a gaze that is generous and loving; other people regard those they meet with a formal and aloof gaze. That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world. A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. "Attention," the psychiatrist Iain McGilchist writes, "is a moral act; it creates, brings an aspect of things into being." The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.

• P62. 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. An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room than an introvert does. A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who's been trained as a security specialist. The therapist, Irvin Yalom, once asked one of his patients to write a summary of each group therapy session they did together. When he read the reports, Yalom realized that she experienced each session radically differently than he did. She had never heard the supposedly brilliant insights Yalom had thought he was sharing with the group. Instead, she noticed the small personal acts—the way one person complimented another's clothing, the same way someone apologized for being late. In other words, we may be at the same event together, but we're each having our own experience of it. Or, as the writer Anis Nin put it, "We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are."

• P74. A list of some of the nonobvious ways to become a better conversationalist:

  • Treat attention as an on/off switch, not a dimmer. Sit up. Lean forward. Ask questions. Nod your head. track the speaker. Listen with your eyes.

  • Be a loud listener.

  • Favor familiarity. People like to talk about a movie they have watched.

  • Make them authors, not witnesses. Put them in the middle of the story by asking "How did that make you feel?", "Where were your boss sitting?"

  • Don't fear the pause.

  • Do the looping. Repeat what you just heard.

  • The midwife model. Be okay with the conversation being lopsided.

  • Keep the gem statement at the center. In conflicts, find the gem.

  • Find the disagreement under the disagreement. "Why, at heart, do we disagree?"

  • Don't be a topper.

• P88. Humble questions are open-ended. They're encouraging the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want to go. These are questions that begin with phrases like "How did you...," "What's it like...," "Tell me about...," and "In what ways...," in her book You're Not Listening, Kate Murphy describes a focus group moderator who was trying to understand why people go to the grocery store late at night. Instead of directly asking, "Why do you go to the grocery store late," which can sound accusatory, she asked, "Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 P.M." A shy, unassuming woman who had said little up to that point raised her hand and responded, "I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a menage a trois—me, Ben, and Jerry.

• P90. Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their lives from a distance. Here are some of my favorite questions that do that:

  • "What crossroads are you at?" At any moment, most of us are in the middle of some transition. The question helps people focus on theirs.

  • "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" Most people know that fear plays some role in their lives, but they haven't clearly defined how fear is holding them back.

  • "If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?"

  • "If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?"

  • 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?"

• P91. We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. I try to compensate for that by asking questions about the positive side 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?"

  • "What has become clearer to you as you have aged?"

• P93. He'd ask people big questions and then sit back and let their answers unfold. "Listen, listen, listen, listen, and if you do, people will talk," he once observed. "They always talk. Why? Because no one has ever listened to them before in all their lives. Perhaps they've not ever even listened to themselves." Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it's best to live life in the form of a question.

• P114. Every conversation exists within a frame: What is the purpose here? What are our goals? A frame is at the stage on which the conversation takes place. During that panel discussion, we were really having an argument about the frame of our conversation. I saw the culture war as one thing and wanted to analyze it from the detached perspective a journalist is trained to adopt. She saw the culture war entirely differently—as an assault on basic justice. She didn't want to analyze it from a detached point of view; she wanted to communicate it as an activist in the middle of a fight. In retrospect, I should have stayed within her frame a little longer instead of trying to yank the conversation back to my frame. That would have shown her proper respect. It might have smoothed out the emotional undercurrents.

• P115. Your first job is to stay within the other person's standpoint to more fully understand how the world looks to them. Your next job is to encourage them to go into more depth about what they have just said. "I want to understand your point of view as much as possible. What am I missing here?" Curiosity is the ability to explore something, even in stressful and difficult circumstances. Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot about the sitter—the way he shifts his weight and moves—whereas the sitter may not be aware that the sat-on person is even there.

• P117. I've learned that if you find yourself in a hard conversation that is going south, there are ways to redeem it. First, you step back from the conflict, and you try to figure out together what's gone wrong. You break the momentum by asking the other person, "How did we get to this tense place?" Then you do something the experts call "splitting." Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are. You say something like, "I certainly wasn't trying to silence your voice. I was trying to include your point of view with the many other points of view on this topic. But I went too fast. I should have paused to try to hear your voice fully so we could build from that reality. That was not respectful to you."

• P120. Unconsciously, you and I are always asking ourselves, What do my physical, intellectual, social, and economic capacities enable me to do in this situation? If you and I are out with a group contemplating a hike up a mountain, different members of the group are literally seeing different mountains, depending on how fit or unfit we are. Rich people walk into Neiman Marcus and see a different store than poor people do, because rich people actually have the capacity to buy things in that store.

• P149. When writing a thank-you note, my egotistical instinct is to write a note about all the ways I'm going to use the gift you just gave me. But if I'm going to be an empathetic person, I need to get outside of my perspective and get inside yours. I'm going to write about your intentions—the impulses that led you to think that this gift is right for me and the thinking process that impelled you to buy it. When you meet someone with cancer, it feels empathetic to tell the person how sorry you are, but my friend Kate Bowler, who actually has cancer, says that the people who show empathy best are those "who hug you and give you impressive compliments that don't feel like a eulogy. People who give you non-cancer-thematic gifts. People who just want to delight you, not try to fix you, and who make you realize that it is just another beautiful day and there is usually something fun to do." That is what caring looks like.

• P264. Let's say you're in a book club. You've been meeting for years and years. Sometimes, you can no longer remember which ideas were yours and which were someone else's. You come to see that all your conversations over the years have been woven together into one long conversation. It's almost as if the club has its own distinct voice, one greater than the individual voice of each member. Two sorts of knowledge have been generated here. The first kind, of course, is a deeper understanding of the books. The second kind of knowledge is more subtle and important. It's knowledge about the club. It's each member's awareness of the dynamics of the group, what role each member tends to take in the conversations, and what gift each member brings. Maybe it is misleading to use the word "knowledge" here. Maybe it's more accurate to call this second kind of knowledge an "awareness." It's the highly attuned sense each person has for how the conversation should be pushed along, for when to talk and when to hold back, when to call in a member who has been quiet.