How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

f you ever saw the old movie Fiddler on the Roof, you know how warm and emotional Jewish families can be. They are always hugging, singing, dancing, laughing, and crying together.

I come from the other kind of Jewish family.

The culture of my upbringing could be summed up by the phrase “Think Yiddish, act British.” We were reserved, stiff-upper-lip types. I’m not saying I had a bad childhood—far from it. Home was a stimulating place for me, growing up. Over our Thanksgiving dinner tables, we talked about the history of Victorian funerary monuments and the evolutionary sources of lactose intolerance (I’m not kidding). There was love in the home. We just didn’t express it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I became a bit detached. When I was four, my nursery school teacher apparently told my parents, “David doesn’t always play with the other children. A lot of the time he stands off to the side and observes them.” Whether it was nature or nurture, a certain aloofness became part of my personality. By high school I had taken up long-term residency inside my own head. I felt most alive when I was engaged in the solitary business of writing. Junior year I wanted to date a woman named Bernice. But after doing some intel gathering, I discovered she wanted to go out with another guy. I was shocked. I remember telling myself, “What is she thinking? I write way better than that guy!” It’s quite possible that I had a somewhat constrained view of how social life worked for most people.

Then, when I was eighteen, the admissions officers at Columbia, Wesleyan, and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago. I love my alma mater, and it has changed a lot for the better since I was there, but back then it wasn’t exactly the sort of get-in-touch-with-your-feelings place that would help thaw my emotional ice age. My favorite saying about Chicago is this one: It’s a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students Saint Thomas Aquinas. The students there still wear T-shirts that read, “Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” And so into this heady world I traipsed and…shocker, I fit right in.

If you had met me ten years out of college, I think you would have found me a pleasant enough guy, cheerful but a tad inhibited—not somebody who was easy to get to know or who found it easy to get to know you. In truth, I was a practiced escape artist. When other people revealed some vulnerable intimacy to me, I was good at making meaningful eye contact with their shoes and then excusing myself to keep a vitally important appointment with my dry cleaner. I had a sense that this wasn’t an ideal way of being. I felt painfully awkward during those moments when someone tried to connect with me. I inwardly wanted to connect. I just didn’t know what to say.

Repressing my own feelings became my default mode for moving through the world. I suppose I was driven by the usual causes: fear of intimacy; an intuition that if I really let my feelings flow, I wouldn’t like what bubbled up; a fear of vulnerability; and a general social ineptitude. One seemingly small and stupid episode symbolizes this repressed way of living for me. I’m a big baseball fan, and though I have been to hundreds of games, I have never once caught a foul ball in the stands. One day about fifteen years ago, I was at a game in Baltimore when a hitter’s bat shattered, and the whole bat except the knob helicoptered over the dugout and landed at my feet. I reached down and grabbed it. Getting a bat at a game is a thousand times better than getting a ball! I should have been jumping up and down, waving my trophy in the air, high-fiving the people around me, becoming a temporary jumbotron celebrity. Instead, I just placed the bat at my feet and sat, still-faced, as everyone stared at me. Looking back, I want to scream at myself: “Show a little joy!” But when it came to spontaneous displays of emotion, I had the emotional capacity of a head of cabbage.

Life has a way of tenderizing you, though. Becoming a father was an emotional revolution, of course. Later, I absorbed my share of the blows that any adult suffers: broken relationships, public failures, the vulnerability that comes with getting older. The ensuing sense of my own frailty was good for me, introducing me to deeper, repressed parts of myself.

Another seemingly small event symbolizes the beginning of my ongoing journey toward becoming a full human being. As a commentator and pundit, I sometimes get asked to sit on panel discussions. Usually, they are at Washington think tanks and they have exactly as much emotional ardor as you’d expect from a discussion of fiscal policy. (As the journalist Meg Greenfield once observed, Washington isn’t filled with the wild kids who stuck the cat in the dryer; it’s filled with the kind of kids who tattled on the kids who stuck the cat in the dryer.) But on this particular day, I was invited to appear on a panel at the Public Theater in New York, the company that would later launch the musical Hamilton. I think we were supposed to talk about the role of the arts in public life. The actress Anne Hathaway was on the panel with me, along with a hilarious and highbrow clown named Bill Irwin and a few others. At this panel, D.C. think-tank rules didn’t apply. Backstage, before the panel, everybody was cheering each other on. We gathered for a big group hug. We charged out into the theater filled with camaraderie and purpose. Hathaway sang a moving song. There were tissues on the stage in case anybody started crying. The other panelists started emoting things. They talked about magical moments when they were undone, transported, or transformed by some artwork or play. Even I started emoting things! As my hero Samuel Johnson might have said, it was like watching a walrus trying to figure skate—it wasn’t good, but you were impressed that you were seeing it at all. Then, after the panel, we celebrated with another group hug. I thought, “This is fantastic! I’ve got to be around theater people more!” I vowed to alter my life.

Yes, I’m the guy who had his life changed by a panel discussion.

Okay, it was a little more gradual than that. But over the years I came to realize that living in a detached way is, in fact, a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but from yourself. So I struck out on a journey. We writers work out our stuff in public, of course, so I wrote books on emotion, moral character, and spiritual growth. And it kind of worked. Over the years, I altered my life. I made myself more vulnerable with people and more emotionally expressive in public. I tried to become the sort of person people would confide in—talk with me about their divorces, their grief over the death of their spouse, worries about their kids. Gradually, things began to change inside. I had these novel experiences: “What are these tinglings in my chest? Oh, they’re feelings!” One day, I’m dancing at a concert: “Feelings are great!” Another day, I’m sad that my wife is away on a trip: “Feelings suck!” My life goals changed, too. When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.

I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings, then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed human being. I’ve made progress over these years. Wait, I can prove this to you! Twice in my life I’ve been lucky enough to have appeared on Oprah’s show Super Soul Sunday, once in 2015 and once in 2019. After we were done taping the second interview, Oprah came up to me and said, “I’ve rarely seen someone change so much. You were so blocked before.” That was a proud moment for me. I mean, she should know—she’s Oprah.

I learned something profound along the way. Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract. The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don’t teach them in school. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life. As a result, a lot of us are lonely and lack deep friendships. It’s not because we don’t want these things. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their face with loving respect and acceptance. It’s that we lack practical knowledge about how to give each other the kind of rich attention we desire. I’m not sure Western societies were ever great at teaching these skills, but over the past several decades, in particular, there’s been a loss of moral knowledge. 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. And a life spent on social media is not exactly helping people learn these skills. On social media you can have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere.

In this age of creeping dehumanization, I’ve become obsessed with social skills: how to get better at treating people with consideration; how to get better at understanding the people right around us. I’ve come to believe that the quality of our lives and the health of our society depends, to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of daily life.

And all these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through. There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

That is at the heart of being a good person, the ultimate gift you can give to others and to yourself.

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Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water. 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.

On the other hand, there are few things as fulfilling as that sense of being seen and understood. I often ask people to tell me about times they’ve felt seen, and with glowing eyes they tell me stories about pivotal moments in their life. They talk about a time when someone perceived some talent in them that they themselves weren’t even able to see. They talk about a time when somebody understood exactly what they needed at some exhausted moment—and stepped in, in just the right way, to lighten the load.

Over the past four years I’ve become determined to learn the skills that go into seeing others, understandings others, making other people feel respected, valued, and safe. First, I’ve wanted to understand and learn these skills for pragmatic reasons. You can’t make the big decisions in life well unless you’re able to understand others. If you are going to marry someone, you have to know not just about that person’s looks, interests, and career prospects but how the pains of their childhood show up in their adulthood, whether their deepest longings align with your own. If you’re going to hire someone, you have to be able to see not just the qualities listed on their résumé but the subjective parts of their consciousness, the parts that make some people try hard or feel comfortable with uncertainty, calm in a crisis, or generous to colleagues. If you’re going to retain someone in your company, you have to know how to make them feel appreciated. In a 2021 study, McKinsey asked managers why their employees were quitting their firms. Most of the managers believed that people were leaving to get more pay. But when the McKinsey researchers asked the employees themselves why they’d left, the top reasons were relational. They didn’t feel recognized and valued by their managers and organizations. They didn’t feel seen.

And if this ability to truly see others is important in making the marriage decision or in hiring and retaining workers, it is also important if you are a teacher leading students, a doctor examining patients, a host anticipating the needs of a guest, a friend spending time with a friend, a parent raising a child, a spouse watching the one you love crawl into bed at the end of the day. Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own. “Artificial intelligence is going to do many things for us in the decades ahead, and replace humans at many tasks, but one thing it will never be able to do is to create person-to-person connections. If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.”

Second, I wanted to learn this skill for what I think of as spiritual reasons. Seeing someone well is a powerfully creative act. No one can fully appreciate their own beauty and strengths unless those things are mirrored back to them in the mind of another. There is something in being seen that brings forth growth. If you beam the light of your attention on me, I blossom. If you see great potential in me, I will probably come to see great potential in myself. If you can understand my frailties and sympathize with me when life treats me harshly, then I am more likely to have the strength to weather the storms of life. “The roots of resilience,” the psychologist Diana Fosha writes, “are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.” In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

And third, I wanted to learn this skill for what I guess you’d call reasons of national survival. Human beings evolved to live in small bands with people more or less like themselves. But today, many of us live in wonderfully pluralistic societies. In America, Europe, India, and many other places, we’re trying to build mass multicultural democracies, societies that contain people from diverse races and ethnicities, with different ideologies and backgrounds. To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across difference and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust—who can say, at the very least, “I’m beginning to see you. Certainly, I will never fully experience the world as you experience it, but I’m beginning, a bit, to see the world through your eyes.”

Our social skills are currently inadequate to the pluralistic societies we are living in. In my job as a journalist, I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel invisible and disrespected: Black people feeling that the systemic inequities that afflict their daily experiences are not understood by whites, rural people feeling they are not seen by coastal elites, people across political divides staring at each other with angry incomprehension, depressed young people feeling misunderstood by their parents and everyone else, privileged people blithely unaware of all the people around them cleaning their houses and serving their needs, husbands and wives in broken marriages who realize that the person who should know them best actually has no clue. Many of our big national problems arise from the fraying of our social fabric. If we want to begin repairing the big national ruptures, we have to learn to do the small things well.

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In every crowd there are Diminishers and there are Illuminators. Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not as persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that other people are just not on their radar screen.

Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know what to look for and how to ask the right questions at the right time. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.

I’m sure you’ve experienced a version of this: You meet somebody who seems wholly interested in you, who gets you, who helps you name and see things in yourself that maybe you hadn’t even yet put into words, and you become a better version of yourself.

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.

Perhaps you know the story that is sometimes told of Jennie Jerome, who later became Winston Churchill’s mother. It’s said that when she was young, she dined with the British statesman William Gladstone and left thinking he was the cleverest person in England. Later she dined with Gladstone’s great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, and left that dinner thinking she was the cleverest person in England. It’s nice to be like Gladstone, but it’s better to be like Disraeli.

Or consider a story from Bell Labs. Many years ago, executives there realized that some of their researchers were far more productive, and amassed many more patents, than the others. Why was this? they wondered. They wanted to know what made these researchers so special. They explored every possible explanation—educational background, position in the company—but came up empty. Then they noticed a quirk. The most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. Aside from making important contributions to communications theory, Nyquist, the scientists said, really listened to their challenges, got inside their heads, asked good questions, and brought out the best in them. In other words, Nyquist was an Illuminator.

So what are you most of the time, a Diminisher or an Illuminator? How good are you at reading other people?

I probably don’t know you personally, but I can make the following statement with a high degree of confidence: You’re not as good as you think you are. We all go through our days awash in social ignorance. William Ickes, a leading scholar on how accurate people are at perceiving what other people are thinking, finds that strangers who are in the midst of their first conversation read each other accurately only about 20 percent of the time and close friends and family members do so only 35 percent of the time. Ickes rates his research subjects on a scale of “empathic accuracy” from 0 to 100 percent and finds great variation from person to person. Some people get a zero rating. When they are in conversation with someone they’ve just met, they have no clue what the other person is actually thinking. But other people are pretty good at reading others and score around 55 percent. (The problem is that people who are terrible at reading others think they are just as good as those who are pretty accurate.) Intriguingly, Ickes finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.

You don’t have to rely on an academic study to know that this is true. How often in your life have you felt stereotyped and categorized? How often have you felt prejudged, invisible, misheard, or misunderstood? Do you really think you don’t do this to others on a daily basis?