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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?

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The purpose of this book is to help us become more skilled at the art of seeing others and making them feel seen, heard, and understood. When I started research on this subject, I had no clue what this skill consisted of. But I did know that exceptional people in many fields had taught themselves versions of this skill. Psychologists are trained to see the defenses people build up to protect themselves from their deepest fears. Actors can identify the core traits of a character and teach themselves to inhabit the role. Biographers can notice the contradictions in a person and yet see a life whole. Teachers can spot potential. Skilled talk show and podcast hosts know how to get people to open up and be their true selves. There are so many professions in which the job is to see, anticipate, and understand people: nursing, the ministry, management, social work, marketing, journalism, editing, HR, and on and on. My goal was to gather some of the knowledge that is dispersed across these professions and integrate it into a single practical approach.

So I embarked on a journey toward greater understanding, a journey on which I still have a long, long way to go. I gradually realized that trying to deeply know and understand others is not just about mastering some set of techniques; it's a way of life. It's like what actors who have gone to acting school experience: When they're onstage, they're not thinking about the techniques they learned in school. They've internalized them, so it is now just part of who they are. I'm hoping this book will help you adopt a different posture toward other people, a different way of being present with people, a different way of having bigger conversations. Living this way can yield the deepest pleasures.