On How to Know a Person

Brooks’s premise is that knowing another person resists optimization. That is what separates How to Know a Person from the genre it sits beside on the shelf — this is not How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Brooks would push back on the whole vocabulary of productivity in social life. Where a book like Atomic Habits wants you more efficient, Brooks’s implicit view is that efficiency is the wrong frame entirely: you cannot rush connection. It takes time and effort to learn a person — thoughtful questions without judgment, listening as people tell their stories, seeing them as more than a means to your own ends. Of course, we all say we know this. The real question is why, knowing it, we so rarely do it.

Getting to know people takes serious effort, and I struggle with it. I can’t always locate the holdup — generalized social anxiety that extends even to friends and family, an inflated ego, a plain lack of talent, or maybe an underestimation of my own abilities. But when I watch people who do it well, and for most of them it seems to come without effort, I feel both seen and baffled: how does this person do it? Brooks calls them “Illuminators” and puts them at roughly a third of the population. I’d guess the real number is far lower. The consolation is that connection is a skill — learnable, practiceable — not a temperament you either have or lack.

The book divides in three. The first part is the nature of connection in general, and how to meet people where they are. The second narrows to the hardest case: how to talk with someone who is depressed, grieving, or carrying low self-esteem. I know that terrain from both sides — as the person in a profound depression and as the person trying to reach someone in one — and I’m no longer sure which side is harder. It is hard to talk when you are the one struggling, and hard to stay receptive when you are down in the depths. I keep telling myself it should be easy. It is not, nor should it be. The fight is real.

The last third is about seeing the whole person: how to talk to people about their values, how to notice strengths others have missed, what wisdom is, why a person’s origins matter. The thread running through it is embodied, personal narrative. What stands out is that the point is not to get the “facts” right in some objective, scientific sense — it’s the story a person tells about themselves. And that story changes over time. When it does, it isn’t because they’re lying or trying to mislead; it’s a fundamental human instinct, and I’d go further and call it a need. It’s how we make meaning.

Brooks illustrates this with a longitudinal study of Harvard men who matriculated in the 1940s. One was so closed-off, embittered, and cynical that he let no one in — a stickler for order, discipline, and coherence whom most of his classmates disliked. He mellowed over the decades, through real struggles with his wife and daughters, and by the end of his life had become so warm and generous that the study’s researcher was struck by it. The researcher mailed him transcripts of his early conversations, and the man refused to recognize them: you’ve sent these to the wrong person. The facts mattered less than his self-image — and that is true for all of us. To live well, we have to take it to heart. If we ran on pure data — if there even is such a thing — we’d be operating against the grain of what makes us human.

The book’s method is to braid research from neuroscientists, psychologists, and other social scientists together with memoir and anecdote — Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, a young man named Deo who came from Burundi to the United States, and countless of Brooks’s own experiences. The braiding is what gives the subject life, and it lets him reach insights I couldn’t have arrived at alone. The writing is charitable, warm, encouraging; in places I felt outright inspired.

One of my core goals for 2026 is to connect more deeply — with strangers, with friends and family, and especially with my fiancée. Reading this, I realized how little my family and I actually connect. My siblings and I can speak from the heart, but it’s a rare day that I connect deeply with either of my parents. So on New Year’s Day, on the drive to take my father to the airport, I tried it — I started by asking how he learned to play guitar. In forty-five minutes I learned more about his history than I had in years. It was illuminating, and it felt good. There is something fitting in this having been the first book I finished in the new year.

What Brooks describes does work, but it takes patience and deliberate effort, and old conversational habits are easy to fall back into. In a conversation with my sister’s boyfriend I was learning a great deal, and only at the end did I notice I’d stopped asking open questions and started steering toward yes-or-no, or supplying my own advice. Rather than punishing myself for it, I’d rather credit the attempt: it’s more than I’d managed before, and there’s no such thing as perfection.

For someone not ready to reflect, the book will read as a catalogue of the obvious. With even a little self-examination, I think nearly anyone alive will find something serious in it. Implemented widely, what’s here might be enough to meet the crisis of connection in the United States and much of Western Europe.