Here are my notes on How to Know a Person by David Brooks (a reader of many books — love child of Brown and hooks).

Book soundtrack (girls to the front on that one) (and if you need a 9-hour playlist)
Book cover videotrack

Alan Parsons Project

  • A person is a point of view.
    • Ask people how they see things.
      • People in different life circumstances literally see different realities. It’s not just about having different opinion on things.
    • Every person is a creative being, taking in life’s events and creating their own personal, unique way of seeing the world. (× Creative Being (living is creating))
      • People see the world not with their eyes, but with their entire life.
  • Attention is a moral act — it creates, brings aspects of things into being.
  • Seeing someone well is a creative act. (× Creative Being (living is creating)) We can only fully appreciate our strengths and beauty when mirrored to us. (× Creative Being (attention gives life; pay attention to something, it grows)) (× All About Love — encouraging people’s full self-expression, their highest potential).
  • Friends are needed to unlock one’s full potential. “A man with few friends is only half-developed. There are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself, he cannot discover them; friends alone can stimulate him and open them.” (Randolph Bourne)
  • We sometimes need to say personal truths to understand them. (co-coaching) We have the answers inside of us; they just need to be brought out (by others).
  • The touchstone of friendship is witnessing — the privilege of being seen by someone and of being granted the sight of the essence of another.
  • Presence: with someone going through a hard time, you don’t have to do anything, you just have to be there, with heightened awareness of what they are experiencing at that moment. Witnessing.
    • Depression: let the person know that you are there.
  • Paraphrase periodically to confirm understanding.
  • What you embody is what you bring forth in people (e.g. playfulness, vulnerability, etc.) What you look for is what you find (beauty, danger, tenderness, individualism, pleasure, unease). (× Trying Not To Try; Your Symphony of Selves)
  • What do you see, when you see a person? What do you decide to see?
    • A pastor sees people as made in the image of God.
    • A pastor tries to see each person the way Jesus would see that person.
  • The more you know someone, the more you love them. “Love is knowledge of the individual.” (Iris Murdoch)
  • To know someone well, know the struggles and blessings of their childhood, the defensive architectures they carry through life.
  • “People are not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of.”
    • Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, it’s best to live life in the form of a question.
  • “It is important to tell at least from time ot time the secret of who we truly and fully are… because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.”
  • Each person is embedded in a culture.
    • See someone’s culture and uniqueness simultaneously. The trick is to see each person both as a product of their culture and as unique individuality (e.g. in how that person responds to their culture).
      • “Bess is a woman of the 1940s and 1950s urban working class and sees the world through that prism. Vivian is a woman of 1960s and 1970s liberal arts academia and sees the world through that prism.”
  • Lesser minds: we assume other people are less complex than us, because we hear the totality of our thoughts but only the fraction spoken out loud by others. We imagine they have “fewer thoughts”.
  • People love talking about themselves. People are longing to be asked questions about who they are.
  • People love talking about things they are familiar with — favourite bands, etc. (Novelty penalty.) Find commonalities.
  • Side-by-side rather than face-to-face. Don’t start to get to know someone with soul-gazing — just do something together, and get accustomed to each other’s energy, temperament, presence. Let your body feel safe and familiar with the other. Only then can you prod for depth.
    • “Becoming comfortable with each other – and it’s no small thing.”
    • “Small talk and just casually being around someone is a vastly underappreciated stage in the process of getting to know someone.”
    • Decelerate the pace of social life — slow down, create safety, let things emerge. Create an environment for people to be their full self with you.
  • Get to know people through play. In the midst of play, people relax, become themselves, and connect without even trying. You can know people deeply without deep conversations (play partners, Primal Play, kids, pets).
  • Sometimes we need to hitch a ride on someone else’s journey, and accompany them a part of the way. (STIs)
  • The thing we need most is relationships. The thing we seem to suck at most is relationships. (Hence work at it.)
  • We are fragile beings. We are precious beings.
  • Being lonely and unseen, one becomes bitter.

Good Vibrations Conversations

  • Good conversations: conversations that lead you to unexpected places — like a common brainstorm.
  • Ask for experiences. Not “what happened to you”, but how you experienced what happened – and how you experience now what you experienced then.
    • “What happened to you?” ⇒ “How did you experience what happened to you? How did you change as a result of what happened to you?”
    • “How did the exam go?” ⇒ “How was the exam?”
    • “Why do you believe X?” ⇒ “What experiences have led you to believe X??”
    • “What are your values?” ⇒ “What are the experiences that make you value what you value?” “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.”
    • “Why are you X? Why is X an issue for you?” ⇒ “What experiences made you this way?”
  • Dare to ask big questions. People underestimate how fast people are willing to go deep and personal. (× Art of Gathering (invite depth); Art of Gathering (make it bold))
    • Big questions turn a merely pleasant evening into a truly memorable one.
  • Talk to strangers. People are bad at predicting how much they’ll enjoy the conversation; underestimate how willing other people are to chat, and how eager they are to go deep and personal.
  • Box of Big Questions (BBQ): (× Art of Gathering (prompt ideas))
    • “What crossroads are you at?” Each person is at all times going through a transition of sorts. Ask for people’s hero journey. (× The Hero With a Thousand Faces) Ask for people’s life stories. Ask for people’s struggles. Every person you meet is involved in a struggle.
    • “What is the gift you currently hold in exile?”
    • “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
    • “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?”
    • “What is the current (or next) chapter of your life about?”
    • “What’s working really well in your life?”
    • “What are you most self-confident about?”
    • “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?”
    • “When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way?”
    • “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.”
    • (Coaching) What do you want to offer the world? What are you doing when you feel most alive? How exactly do you fill your days?
  • Box of Big Activities
  • Ask people for their life stories. Tell your life story.
    • People very rarely get asked to tell their life story — yet it’s healing, lets people be deeply seen.
    • We create our life story more and more, the more times we tell it. We make more sense of our life each time we tell our life story. “It’s 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.” Meaning emerges.
      • Imago: the role (archetype) you’re assuming in your life story, e.g. Healer, Caregiver, Warrior, Sage, Maker, Counselor, Survivor, Arbiter, Juggler, Fighter… (× The Hero With a Thousand Faces)
        • Identities: we assume successive identities in life. Try on different identities; eventually settle on one.
          • Identity achievement (explored & settled); foreclosure (settling too soon); moratorium (never settling); diffusion (no identities). (James Marcia)
          • “A husband in the way you’re supposed to be a husband, going home at night grateful that the one person in the whole world you most want to talk with is going to be sitting right there across the dinner table from you.” *
          • When acting (and in general), understand the stories the characters tell themselves — their point of view.
            • “A killer is not thinking, “I’m a killer”; a killer is thinking, “I’m here to restore order”” (× To The Actor) (And somebody here to restore order is thinking…)
            • “Playing another character is a powerful way to widen your repertoire of perspectives.”
        • Narrative crisis: when you have to rewrite the plot, find a new story, or change identity. When a project turns out to be a dud.
      • Plot line: the archetypal plot that you view your life story as (Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, Quest) (× The Hero With a Thousand Faces)
      • Redacted parts. Which parts are you leaving out when you’re sharing your life story?
        • These are the parts that you refuse to see, and as such cannot confront and overcome.
      • Therapists are story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong. Therapists reframe — rewrite the story such that the patient has more control over their life in their story. (× Psycho-Cybernetics) (× Essentialism (editing))
      • Interpersonal vs imperial life task: relationships-focussed period vs achievement-focussed period.
        • At the end of an imperial life task, one notices a spiritual lack and wonders how they could suppress their feelings for so long. “It’s time to come in from the cold — and bold random words.”
      • As we age, we construct a better and more accurate life story; better aware of our strengths, weaknesses, and the “core desire line that will always propel our life forward; we re-interpret the past, being more forgiving and appreciative.
      • “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.”
      • Life story across generations: “a person is part of a long movement, a transmission from one generation to another.”
    • Know your story to write the next chapter. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of.
    • Our inner voice organizes random events into one coherent story with meaning and purpose.
    • “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.”
  • Open questions (like accompaniment) are a surrender of power. Asking questions is a surrender of power, is admitting not knowing (× All About Love (patriarchy)).
    • “An insecure, self-protected world is a world with fewer questions.”
  • Use second or third-person for move effective debugging. “You are having trouble with X” “Axel is having difficulty with Y” (× Clear Thinking)

Conflicts (The Sound of C)

  • Difficult conversations / Conversations gone south (× Sex Talks; Never Split the Difference) (conflicts as an opportunity for growth and intimacy)
    • Gem statement: Realign with the common intention; something (fundamental) you can both agree on. (× Sex Talks: same team)
    • Find the disagreement under the disagreement: what are we fundamentally disagreeing on? (× “we’re not really fighting about this”) (And why do we have this fundamental disagreement — what in our respective pasts have led us to these respective positions?)
    • Shared pool of knowledge. Build a shared pool of knowledge instead of defending your point of view. (× Sex Talks: “in an act of joint vulnerability”)
    • “Splitting”: express what your motives aren’t, and what your motives are (“I didn’t mean to X. I mean to Y”)
    • “How did we get there?”
  • “He can’t do these things (opening oneself up emotionally) because he doesn’t possess the consciousness that she has access to.”

Personality tr8s

Death

  • 3 months to live: “Having a gun pointed at our heads inspired us to become our best, most open-hearted, honest and bravest selves.” (Death, urgency.)
  • “The awareness of death seems to make life’s trivialities seem… trivial.”
    • Seize today’s joys and gifts, before it becomes urgent.
      • “Cancer cures psychoneurosis. What a pity I had to wait till now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.”