When you can predict every word someone will say, you’ve stopped listening, not them.
REFLECTION
WHAT THIS MEANS
Boredom with a person is usually a fact about your model of them. Once you have built a summary, you stop taking in new information and start playing the summary back, so of course every sentence sounds like one you have heard. They have not run out of things to say; you have run out of curiosity.
The test is easy enough. Ask them something you genuinely cannot predict the answer to: what they were like at nine, what they would do with a free Saturday, what they are worried about. If the answer surprises you, the problem was never them being predictable.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
Whom do you finish sentences for instead of hearing out?
MORE IN PERCEPTION & ATTENTION
- In a crisis, the person who notices the exit is more useful than the one who notices the drama.
- Eyewitnesses can be completely sure and completely wrong. Hold your memories with a little humility.
- The moon looks bigger near the horizon, but it isn’t. Your brain is guessing. Don’t trust every size it tells you.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.