What Is How to Know a Person?

Published in October 2023, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen is the latest major work from David Brooks — op-ed columnist for The New York Times, commentator on PBS NewsHour, and bestselling author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain.

It is not a book about small talk. It is a book about one of the most profound — and most neglected — human capacities: the ability to truly see another person and to make them feel seen. Brooks argues that this single skill sits at the center of every healthy marriage, friendship, workplace, community, and nation.

The book is organized into three parts. Part One (“I See You”) covers how to engage with people under normal circumstances — the tools, techniques, and mindsets for genuine connection. Part Two (“I See You in Your Struggles”) explores how those skills must deepen when someone is suffering. Part Three (“I See You with Your Strengths”) looks at how we can help people rewrite and expand the stories they tell about their own lives.

Brooks draws from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, theater, history, and personal experience — weaving together an unusually rich tapestry for a self-help book. He also draws on his own past: he openly admits he spent much of his career as a classic diminisher, emotionally detached and too focused on ideas to truly see the people around him.

Why This Book, Why Now: The Loneliness Epidemic

Brooks didn’t write this book in a vacuum. He wrote it in response to a crisis he was watching unfold in American life — one that he calls an “epidemic of blindness.” We are failing, on a massive scale, to see one another.

These are not abstract numbers. Brooks connects them directly to a breakdown in our ability to relate to one another — a skill that, he argues, was never properly taught to begin with. Schools teach reading and mathematics, but not empathy, active listening, or the art of asking a meaningful question.

The consequences compound. Brooks observes that loneliness leads to meanness — “pain that is not transformed gets transmitted.” Lonely people become suspicious. They are, according to research he cites, seven times more likely to get involved in angry political movements. The political polarization we see today, he suggests, may in large part be a symptom of people who feel nobody sees them.

This reframes the book entirely. How to Know a Person is not just a guide to better friendships — it is a quiet argument that the health of democracy itself depends on our ability to see one another’s humanity.

Illuminators vs. Diminishers: The Central Distinction

The most memorable and useful framework in the book is the contrast between two kinds of people Brooks calls Illuminators and Diminishers.

Brooks is careful to say that being an Illuminator is not a personality type you are born with. It is a craft, a set of learnable skills, a way of life. He even coins a term for it: Illuminationism — the intentional practice of seeing others fully.

Different cultures, he notes, have their own words for this way of being. The Koreans call it nunchi — the ability to read others’ moods and feelings with sensitivity. The Germans have herzensbildung — literally “the training of the heart to see the full humanity in another.” What these traditions share is the insight that deep human perception is not a gift; it is a discipline.

Brooks identifies the number-one reason people become Diminishers: ego. As he puts it directly: “I can’t see you because I’m all about myself.” The second reason is insecurity — there is so much noise inside our own heads that we simply cannot be present. The third is a failure of curiosity: we have stopped finding other people genuinely interesting.

One test Brooks offers is disarming in its simplicity: Are you a question-asker? He estimates that only about 30% of people regularly ask questions in conversation. The other 70% are perfectly pleasant — they just aren’t curious. And curiosity, he argues, is a moral act. It is a declaration that the person in front of you matters.

The Art of Asking the Right Questions

One of the most practical sections of the book is Brooks’ deep exploration of what questions actually do in a conversation — and what kinds of questions open people up versus shut them down.

His core insight is a simple but powerful reframe: instead of asking someone what they think about something, ask them how they came to think it. The first question invites a position. The second invites a story — and stories are where people actually live.

Brooks is equally direct about bad questions. The worst questions, he writes, are the ones that don’t involve a surrender of power — questions that evaluate or accuse rather than invite. Many questions that sound neutral are actually subtle demands for the other person to justify themselves.

Here are some of the Illuminator questions Brooks recommends — questions that have been shown to open people up and create genuine connection:

• How did you come to believe what you believe about that?
• What’s a piece of unfinished business in your life?
• Tell me about the person who shaped your values the most.
• What’s something you care deeply about that you feel isn’t understood?
• What crossroads are you at right now?
• In retrospect, was that experience a disaster — or did it send you somewhere you’re grateful for?
• What have you given up on, and what does that feel like?
• What’s the most important thing I should know about you to understand your experience?

The researcher Dan McAdams, whom Brooks cites, asks people for their life’s high points, low points, and turning points — and a conversation can last four hours. At the end, many participants refuse the check they were promised. They didn’t want to stop. That is what the right question can unleash.

Why We Don’t Actually Listen — and How to Start

Asking good questions is only half the equation. The other half — arguably harder — is truly listening to the answer. Brooks argues that most of us are terrible at this, and for a specific reason: once someone starts talking, we immediately shift into response mode.

We stop processing what is being said and start composing our reply. The conversation becomes a tennis match where neither player actually watches the ball — only waits for their turn to swing. The other person senses this, even if they can’t name it, and slowly stops sharing the things that actually matter to them.

Deep listening, by contrast, requires something close to self-erasure — temporarily setting aside your own frame of reference to inhabit someone else’s. It means resisting the urge to say “I know exactly what you mean, the same thing happened to me.” It means staying with the other person’s experience rather than using it as a launchpad back to your own.

Brooks draws on neuroscience here, citing work by Lisa Feldman Barrett: our emotional state actively shapes what we perceive. What we feel alters what we see and hear. A person who is anxious will literally hear and see the world differently than a calm one. This means that truly listening to someone also means trying to understand the emotional lens through which they are experiencing reality — not just the words coming out of their mouth.

Every Person Is a Point of View: Reading Someone’s Story

One of the book’s richest philosophical contributions is its argument that people are not sets of facts — they are points of view. To know a person is to understand the specific vantage point from which they experience the world, and that vantage point was built, piece by piece, by everything that has ever happened to them.

Brooks introduces the concept of constructionism: we do not passively receive reality; we actively construct it from the raw material of our experiences, memories, culture, and temperament. Two people at the same event are at two completely different events. Fit people literally estimate hills to be less steep. Someone with savings in the bank sees a parking ticket very differently than someone living paycheck to paycheck.

To truly know someone, Brooks argues, you need to understand three layers of their story: the immediate events of their life, the cultural and communal context they grew up in, and the deeper ancestral history that shaped their family and community before they were even born.

He also cites the psychologist David Bradley’s provocative claim: “The one thing you can be certain about every person is that nobody escapes high school.” Whatever your fears and longings were at sixteen, they are still there, dressed in adult clothes. Understanding someone’s high-school-era wounds — their need for belonging, their terror of rejection, their hunger for recognition — often unlocks their present behavior.

And then there’s the relationship between experience and meaning. Brooks quotes Aldous Huxley’s famous line — “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you” — to make the point that the same event can produce radically different people, depending on what meaning they made of it. A good Illuminator doesn’t just ask what happened; they ask what it meant, and what it means now.

Being Present in Someone’s Suffering

Part Two of the book is, in some ways, its heart. Brooks turns to the harder question: how do you truly see and accompany someone who is in pain?

His answer is uncomfortable but clear: you do not try to fix them. You do not try to cheer them up. You do not offer silver linings or suggest that things will get better. You stay. You remain present in the darkness alongside them, without needing to turn the light on immediately.

Brooks draws on his own experience accompanying a friend through severe depression. He made all the classic mistakes at first — trying to inject optimism, redirecting toward solutions, subtly communicating that he was uncomfortable with the depth of the pain. What he eventually learned was that the most healing thing he could do was simply to not leave — to send a note, to show up, to make clear that the friendship was not contingent on the other person being okay.

He also distinguishes between two levels of every hard conversation: the official conversation (the surface topic being discussed) and the actual conversation (the underlying emotional reality). A conversation that is officially about a job loss is actually about shame, fear, and identity. The skill of an Illuminator is to gently work at both levels — honoring the surface while making space for what’s underneath.

Brooks also addresses what he calls “idiot compassion” — borrowing a Buddhist concept to describe the kind of unconditional positive regard that never challenges anyone, never risks discomfort, and ultimately consoles while also concealing. Real friendship, he argues, is a balance of warmth and honesty: it holds someone in high regard while also being willing to call them on their self-deceptions.

The Best Quotes from the Book

Brooks is a gifted writer, and the book is full of passages worth returning to. Here are some of the most striking:

On Seeing Others

On Loneliness and Its Consequences

On Wisdom

On Everyday Attention

On Friendship

On the Illuminator

Practical Takeaways: How to Become an Illuminator

Unlike many books that describe problems without solutions, How to Know a Person is quietly, insistently practical. Here is a distillation of its most actionable guidance.

1. Shift from “What do you think?” to “How did you come to think that?”

This single reframe changes almost every conversation. It invites story instead of position, and positions people as subjects of their own experience rather than holders of opinions to be evaluated.

2. Become a question-asker — intentionally

Ask at least one genuine follow-up question in every meaningful conversation. Not a clarifying question. A curious one. “Tell me more about that” is always available. Use it.

3. Notice when you’ve entered response mode — and exit it

When you catch yourself mentally composing your reply while someone is still speaking, that is the signal. Return to their words. What are they actually trying to say? What is behind the words?

4. Pay attention to the 90%

Most of life is not dramatic moments — it is the ordinary texture of how someone moves through the world. How do they treat people with less power? What do they do when they think no one is watching? These small things are enormous.

5. Ask about formation, not opinion

When you disagree with someone, resist the urge to challenge them immediately. Instead ask: “Tell me about the people or experiences that led you to see it that way.” You will often find a human story underneath the position — and you will be harder to dismiss, and easier to trust.

6. Stay when someone is suffering

You do not need to fix it. You do not need to make it better. You need to not leave. Send the text. Make the call. Show up. Make it clear the relationship is not contingent on them being okay.

7. Ask yourself: Do people leave conversations with me feeling bigger or smaller?

This is the ultimate Illuminator test. Not “was it a good conversation for me?” — but did the other person leave feeling seen, respected, and more themselves? That is the goal.

Is It Worth Reading? An Honest Verdict

The book has earned wide praise — a 9/10 from leadership writers, glowing reviews in the Washington Post, and genuine resonance among readers across demographics. Its core argument is compelling, its writing is warm and clear, and its framework of Illuminators vs. Diminishers is genuinely useful and memorable.

Some critics have noted that Brooks can be light on structural or systemic analysis — focusing heavily on individual behavior while underweighting the social institutions (community centers, extended family networks, public spaces) that once created the conditions for connection to flourish. For readers who want that kind of argument, Robin Dunbar’s work on friendship or Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone may be useful companions.

A minority of readers find the book’s scope modest for its ambition — that Brooks is describing skills most socially gifted people already have intuitively. But that critique misses the point: this book is for the large majority of people who were never taught these skills and have spent their lives quietly wondering why their relationships feel shallow.

What makes it particularly worthwhile is its honesty. Brooks does not write from a place of mastery. He writes as someone who spent decades as a diminisher — emotionally remote, ideas-focused, uncomfortable with vulnerability — and who came, late, to understand what he had been missing. That honesty makes the book feel less like a lecture and more like a letter from a friend.

Bottom line: If you want to be better at relationships — with partners, children, colleagues, or strangers — this book will change how you show up in conversations. It is practical, compassionate, and, in our current moment of social fragmentation, genuinely necessary.

Where to Get the Book & Learn More