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Reading people

The Analects

The answer fits the asker

The Analects (Spring and Autumn · 551–479 BC) — The answer fits the asker.

Reading peoplePre-Qin and classicalThe answer fits the asker

What actually happened?

At fifty-five he set out with his students to find a ruler who would use him, and for fourteen years none would. Between Chen and Cai the party was cut off and the provisions ran out; seven days with nothing to eat, and some of the students began to give way. Zilu came to him angry: does a gentleman also come to the end of his rope? He does, Confucius said. The gentleman holds when he is cornered; the small man, cornered, will do anything at all. He went home to Lu in the end and spent what was left of his life putting the old texts in order.

Every answer has a name attached

He was asked what ren is more than a hundred times and answered differently nearly every time, because the answer was cut to the person asking. Read the answers with the askers deleted and you get a bag of contradictions. Read them with the askers restored and you get a method.

The impulsive student is told to restrain himself and return to form. The plodding one is told, simply, to love people. Same question, different prescriptions.

Say what you do not know

Knowing what you know and knowing what you do not know is what he calls knowledge. He held to it himself: asked something by a countryman, he said his mind went blank and all he could do was work in from both extremes of the question.

Guessing at a number in a meeting costs nothing that morning and costs three teams two weeks once they have planned against it.

Three layers for reading a person

See what he does, mark his motives, examine where he rests. Behaviour can be staged for as long as somebody is watching, the route he took to get here is expensive to stage, and what he is comfortable with when nothing is at stake can hardly be staged at all.

Two people hit the same number. One spent next year's budget to do it. The route, not the number, predicts the next quarter.

Harmony is not sameness

The gentleman harmonises without conforming; the small man conforms without harmony. A room in complete agreement about something complicated has usually not agreed. The disagreement has moved outside the meeting, where nothing can be done with it.

No questions at the review, and then the problems arrive one by one after launch — each of them seen by somebody beforehand.

One rule for a lifetime, and it is a prohibition

Asked for a single word to act on all one's life, he gave reciprocity: what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. The negative form is the point. It needs no knowledge of the other person, only honesty about yourself.

Read the hard email once as if it had landed in your own inbox before you send it.

How do I use it today?

Pick the last decision you made that landed on somebody who had no vote in it, and run the one test: would you have accepted it if it had been done to you, in that manner, on that notice? Where the answer is no, the part that has to change is usually not the decision but how it was delivered.

Deep read

Knowing what you knowThe half that has to be said out loudSaying you don't know is an operation, and it is rarer than it soundsThree layers of looking at a personEach layer is harder to fake than the lastWhat he did, the road he took, and where he is at easeDo not do it to themThe one word he said would last a lifetimeThe rule is a prohibition, and that is exactly why it can be keptHarmony is not samenessAgreement and consent are different thingsA room that agreed on everything has agreed on nothing

Read alongside

Tao Te ChingThe two main lines of Chinese thought: Confucius adds — cultivate, practise, take part — where Laozi subtracts. Neither is complete without the other. SocratesNear contemporaries who both taught by asking rather than telling, and both paid for holding a position against the people in power. MenciusThe Analects tells a gentleman how to conduct himself; Mencius tells a ruler what will remove him. Strategies of the Warring StatesTwo faces of the same broken age: one on what a person ought to become, the other on how people behaved. Read only one and you end up naive or cynical. GuiguziConfucius asks whether a thing should be said at all; Guiguzi asks only how to say it so that it works. The avowed and the suppressed halves of the same tradition. La RochefoucauldConfucius holds that self-cultivation leads to benevolence. La Rochefoucauld suspects self-cultivation is only the most sophisticated form self-love has found so far.

Further

Wang Yangming Zeng Guofan Tao Te Ching Socrates Mencius Hannah Arendt

Lines to keep

Knowing what you know and what you do not: that is knowledge.

See what he does. Mark his motives. Examine where he rests.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.