Empathy
Over the past few months, I feel like I have developed a lot more empathy for other people. I don’t think I could point to a particular moment or reason behind that, other than being able to say that I, more broadly, have been around a larger amount of people and had a wider array of experiences.
The nature of this, hearing about how different people were brought up and how that led to the personalities that they developed, is fascinating to me. With each new story of someone’s high school experience, and how that translated to the way that they act in college, my understanding of the workings of our society begins to expand. I have this constellation in my mind of these moments. When I meet someone new, I am able to ease my cognitive load in trying to understand them by placing them in a bucket that already exists in my mind.
This is all subconscious, and of course there’s never going to be enough buckets to understand everyone, but with each new bucket, I can get closer to accurate when I’m meeting a new person.
As an example, let’s say I have two buckets in my mind.
People that went to a private high school that came from rich families that were super fortunate and people that went to a public high school and came from a middle class family.
With each person that I meet, I can (subconsciously) place them into one of those two buckets, depending on which they are closer to fitting. The reason I will do that is to better understand the way that they operate. If someone is in the rich-family bucket, then when I’m deciding where to go eat with them, I know they’ll care less if it’s an expensive or cheap restaraunt than would the middle-income bucket.
But if I only had two buckets as mentioned above, then I would be making a lot of assumptions and only know a limited amount about people.
It means that someone who is a 100 millionaire because their dad is a CEO falls into the same bucket as someone who has parents that have done well for themselves, but have no vacation homes and still have to worry about paying their kids through college.
Now, what if those two buckets became four buckets.
- Private high-school super duper rich
- Private high-school, moderately wealthy
- Public high-school, moderately wealthy
- Public high-school, lower middle class
Now when I meet someone, and can put them in one of the buckets, I will understand more about them, and be more accurate in my assessment of who they are and how they work.
I call that empathy. And imagine if instead of four buckets I have 100. or 1000.
As we meet new people and hear about different experiences, these buckets continue to expand and we begin to have more empathy for people because we can better understand them.
I don’t think I’ll ever be 100% accurate on someone as I’m placing them into a bucket, but the difference between 20% accurate and 50% is monumental and helps both with relationship building and with understanding whether they are someone I want to spend time with.
Expanding the constellation
One thing that expanded this understanding of empathy a ton was the book Hillbilly Elegy. The reason is that it’s a book rooted in the life of a rural, low-income white guy and his family. After exploring his experiences throughout the book, each encounter I have with a white person from the middle of the country that is low-income becomes a bit more clear.
In these encounters that I have now, I understand just a bit more where they are coming from. How they might have been upbrought. What their towns at least broadly look like. It allows me to be more thoughtful if we’re going out for a meal, or if we’re on the topic of money or vacations.
From a personal life aspect, it’s quite powerful, and when I think about it in terms of business, it’s the same. You have to understand your users, and being able to empathize with them is monumental.
These constellations and buckets will continue to grow and expand for me, and the best way to do so is to keep meeting new people, to keep learning other people’s stories and to really listen when people talk.
My favorite part
The thing I like the most about this is that having more empathy helps me avoid being as judgemental because I can try to put myself in someone else’s shoes and understand why they might be acting the way that they are. That allows me to see past little things that others might not about a person and it makes me less upset when people act negatively towards me.
It’s interesting and it’s fun. The world is a weird place, and everyone is so unique.
