How to know a person - Notes

A selection of quotes I saved from the book along with my raw notes on them.

Overall, 3.8/5 book for me. More information dense than other books of this type, but could’ve been about 20% shorter, the last bit really felt like it dragged on with little to no actionable advice.

Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic.

• Try to approach every conversation with curiosity. It’s not always immediately apparent where the fascination lies but it’ll become clear over time.

Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.” What a fantastic way to train your imagination in the art of seeing others.

• Again the book comes back to the idea of being curious about others as a principal that can improve most interactions. In this case being open to other opinions and experiences can improve your connection.

A great way to mis-see people is to see only a piece of them.

• We’re often too quick to judge people’s character by only seeing a small slice of them. This divides us.

She found it more useful to ask, How do you treat others? How do you make them feel?

• I think this gives a pretty deep view into someone’s values and what they bring to the people close to them.

“Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

“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?”

• Getting deeper about not only what shaped the person, but how they faced those experiences can give us a better understanding of them.

We need to ask: How does this look to you? Do you see the same situation I see? Then we need to ask: What are the experiences and beliefs that cause you to see it that way? For example, I might ask, What happened to you in childhood that makes you still see the world from the vantage point of an outsider? What was it about your home life that makes celebrating holidays and hosting dinner parties so important to you? You hate asking for favors. Why is that such an issue for you? You seem to have it all, and yet you are insecure. Why is that?

• This has been something I’ve been doing more recently. It’s an introspection of your values to understand why they’re important and the origin story behind them. This is a repeated theme in the book.

A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.

• Always love a conversation that changes my mind, or introduces a new way of thinking. The more I interact with people from different backgrounds and upbringings the more this happens.

\ People aren’t specific enough when they tell stories. They tend to leave out the concrete details. But if you ask them specific questions—“Where was your boss sitting when he said that? And what did you say in response?”—they are likely to revisit the moment in a more vivid way. 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.

• I often feel like im interrogating people when I question them about their experiences, I think there’s a balance to this that can be tough to strike between giving and taking in any conversation. But mutual curiosity certainly helps.

“The experience of being listened to all the way on something—until your meaning is completely clear to another human being—is extremely rare in life.”

• Cutoffs happen, stories often end interrupted. Even with a story fully told the meaning might not have been conveyed. Conveying meaning is hard, fully understanding is just as difficult.

In my case, he’d ranked the things I really wanted to do on one card and the things I was actually doing on another card. On a third card, he had written out a strategy for how I could get card B to look more like card A.

• Just seemed like a great exercise for anyone on figuring out what we think our priorities are, and if we’re actually doing anything to meet them.

Humble questions are open-ended. They’re encouraging the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it 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.

• Seems obvious but the amount of conversations ive seen die with just ‘where are you from?’ ‘Xyz’ ‘oh cool’ …

“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 life, 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?” Peter Block is an author and consultant who writes about community development and civic engagement. He is a master at coming up with questions that lift you out of your ruts and invite fresh reevaluations. Here are some of his: “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?…What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?…What forgiveness are you withholding?…How have you contributed to the problem you’re trying to solve?…What is the gift you currently hold in exile?”

• Just an interesting list of questions to connect with people

Distrust sows distrust. It creates a feeling that the only person you can count on is yourself. Distrustful people assume that others are out to get them, they exaggerate threats, they fall for conspiracy theories that explain the danger they feel.

• Seen this at some companies and teams.

If a subtext of this book is that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you, then one of the subsequent lessons is that to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared? To be a good friend and a good person you have to know how to accompany someone through this process.

• I think we often hear the stories people go through but not how they were shaped by them.

First, friends can ask each other the kinds of questions that help people see more deeply into their own childhoods. Psychologists recommend that you ask your friend to fill in the blanks to these two statements: “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 ________.” That’s a way to help a person see more clearly the deep values that were embedded in the way they were raised.

Second, you can try “This Is Your Life.” This is a game some couples play at the end of each year. They write out a summary of the year from their partner’s point of view. That is, they write, in the first person, about what challenges their partner faced and how he or she overcame them. Reading over these first-person accounts of your life can be an exhilarating experience. You see yourself through the eyes of one who loves you. People who have been hurt need somebody they trust to narrate their life, stand up to their own self-contempt, and believe the best of them.

The third exercise is called “Filling in the Calendar.” This involves walking through periods of the other person’s life, year by year. What was your life like in second grade? In third grade?

• Just seemed an interesting exercise. It’s always fun to hear how someone grew up and what they were like in school and how they’ve changed or stayed the same over time.

The Big Five traits are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness.

• I hadn’t heard of this before

We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal.

• Social anxiety is real, but I don’t remember any conversation with someone new that I’ve regretted.

when I’m in a conversation with someone now, I’m trying to push against that and get us into narrative mode. I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.” That prompts a story. Then there is the habit of taking people back in time: Where’d you grow up? When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way? I’m not shy about asking people about their childhoods: What did you want to be when you were a kid? What did your parents want you to be? Finally, I try to ask about intentions and goals. When people are talking to you about their intentions, they are implicitly telling you about where they have been and where they hope to go.

• Another list of interesting and engaging questions.

The ability to craft an accurate and coherent life story is yet another vital skill we don’t teach people in school. But coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life. 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.

• I don’t entirely agree with the last parts of this, but overall I’ve always struggled with telling a coherent life story, and I’m always impressed by others that do.

People who grew up in WEIRD cultures, Henrich finds, are much less conformist than people in most other cultures. They are more loyal to universal ideals and maybe a little less loyal to friends. For example, while most people in Nepal, Venezuela, or South Korea would lie under oath to help a friend, 90 percent of Americans and Canadians do not think their friends have a right to expect such a thing. That’s weird!

• The communities and people we grow up around shape our values. This is an interesting example since I fall into the former bucket having grown up in both cultures.