You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover⁠↗

These details, paradoxically, only reveal themselves when you listen without an evaluative agenda weighing down your perception.

Many times, you’ve walked into a room and started talking and, within five minutes, someone has glimpsed all of your blind spots, laid out as clearly as jars in a spice rack. Of course they didn’t tell you, they correctly ascertained that you weren’t ready to hear their feedback. It can be an act of love and compassion to have faith that someone else will learn the lessons they need to learn. This is “silence that speaks volumes,” a signal that is very hard to listen for.

Over time, you get better at discerning qualities that are hard to fake: embodied wisdom, integrity, hard-earned joy. You start to be attracted—in friendships, in working relationships, in intimate partnership—to these finer qualities, rather than chasing after shiny object people who promise to make up for what you lack.

Almost nobody reaches a position of real respect undeservedly. Famous buffoons don’t get respect from the people they really want it from, just sycophants whose praise is meaningless.

Individuals say dumb things. But there is such intelligence in the interplay, in what resonates versus what dies. You can bear witness without getting hooked on every passing drama. Strangely, this is self-possession: the ability to let others be as they are.