Reading people
Tending the Roots of Wisdom
A method of ease
Tending the Roots of Wisdom (Ming · c. 1590s) — A method of ease.
What actually happened?
Almost nothing survives about Hong Yingming beyond a studio name and the decades he wrote in. What survives is the title, borrowed from a line by the Song scholar Wang Xinmin: a man who can chew through vegetable roots can do anything. Vegetable roots are what is left when there is nothing else — bitter, stringy, what the poor ate. The book never once promises that things will go your way. It assumes they will not, and then works on what is still yours: how much you show, how much you give up, and what you do with the ache when somebody else succeeds.
Give way for your own sake, not theirs
Where the path is narrow, leave a step for others to pass. Two people wedged against each other on a narrow path means nobody passes. Whoever has to be first at everything wins each occasion and loses the next, because the man opposite braces on sight from then on.
Enduring for somebody else's sake keeps a ledger and presents the bill later. Giving way so you need not stay braced is over when it is over.
Three parts off, not the whole dish
The instruction is measured: a step, three parts. Whoever hands everything over ends up living on the other person's conscience, which is no steadier a position than having to win every time. Seven parts stay with you, and that is what makes it repeatable.
Put a figure on the concession before you make it: how much this time, and what is still mine afterwards.
The fear of exposure is an arithmetic problem
Being afraid of being found out means more has been put on display than is actually held. What wants treating is the gap, not the fear: fill in what you have, or take back part of what you showed. Both beat holding up a front that must never be tested.
Do not exhibit your single best performance as the normal one. Expectations settle at whatever height you showed.
Envy starts in your gap, not in their gift
Do not use your own strength to throw another's weakness into relief; do not let your own clumsiness turn into resentment of another's skill. Two clauses, one thing: hurrying to look strong and being unable to bear good news run off the same root.
You can make someone smaller without a single hard word, simply by steering every conversation back onto the ground you are best on.
How do I use it today?
Take the next concession you are about to make and put a number on it before you make it: is this three parts or all of it, and am I doing it for him or so that I can stop holding myself tight? The measured version is the one you will still be able to do in a year.
Deep read
Read alongside
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Lines to keep
He calls it a method of ease, not a virtue.