What do you send back?

Dear friend,

The other day, a man showed me his middle finger. I showed him a heart.

For a long time, my Cybertruck was a reason for strangers to smile. People gave me a thumbs up and were excited about it. Then Elon became a political figure, and for many people a polarizing one, and the thumbs transformed into middle fingers. The truck was the same, and so was I. What people saw in it was different.

I do not know the story of the man who flipped the bird at me, and he does not know mine. In that moment I only knew what I wanted to send back. Most of us carry an image of the other side, and the image we hold often feels more real than the people themselves.

This week, America voted in the midterm elections. Maybe you woke up on Wednesday relieved. Maybe you woke up worried. Maybe you are reading this from far away and are simply tired of all of it. Whatever you woke up with, this letter is for you.

I believe politics matters. It shapes the schools our children learn in and the country they will inherit. I voted.

And then I try to do something that feels almost rebellious: I give the politicians back their share of my attention, and no more. One day every few years is theirs. The other days belong to the people I can actually reach, the kids at the breakfast table, the neighbor, the stranger in the next lane. I cannot change what happens in Washington or Berlin this week. I can change what happens in my car at a red light.

What I try to practice is the way I meet it. I try to judge the action and leave the person out of the judgment. A good policy stays good when it comes from someone I do not like, and a bad idea stays bad when it comes from someone I admire. It sounds simple. For me it is one of the hardest practices I know.

There is an old line, usually credited to Eleanor Roosevelt, though nobody can prove she ever said it: great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. I do not believe anyone has a small mind. I do believe every mind, mine included, slides toward people when it is tired. Noticing where my mind lands first, and gently walking it back to the idea, is most of the practice.

In 2019, researchers at More in Common asked 2,100 Americans what they believed the other side thinks. Both sides got it wrong, and each believed almost twice as many people on the other side held extreme views as actually did. The more news people followed, the further their image was from the truth.

The image we hold of others is blurry. The image we hold of our own views is not much sharper. At Summit at Sea I had the chance to sit down with the neuroscientist David Eagleman. During his talk he asked a room full of confident people to draw a bicycle. A working one: where the frame goes, where the chain connects, what turns what. Almost nobody could. We have all ridden one since we were children, and still the machine in our heads falls apart the moment we put it on paper.

Psychologists call this the illusion of explanatory depth, and it reaches well beyond bicycles. When researchers asked people to explain, step by step, how the policies they felt most strongly about would actually work, people rated their own understanding lower afterwards, and their positions softened. Most of us can say which side we are on long before we can say what the side is for.

So that man and I may have more in common than either of us would guess. We both carry imaginary pictures, of each other and of our own certainties. What we can choose is whether we check them against a real person, and against a real explanation.

When Angela Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union, lost the German federal election in 2021, its leaders asked me to help them think about how to reinvent the party. I wrote about it in my book What's Next Is Now: “Although I did not share a political affiliation with this party, I agreed to meet with them because I was interested to hear about their challenges.”

After a long discussion, I had exactly one insight to share with them: your curiosity is gone. Their assumptions had grown so tight around the same old data that they had stopped looking for anything new. Years earlier, the man who is now Chancellor of Germany had sat in one of my workshops in Silicon Valley with his leadership team. Whoever is in the room, the insight stays the same, and I think it belongs to all of us, on every side, including mine.

The curiosity researcher Scott Shigeoka, who describes himself as a queer Asian American from Hawaii who lives in a city and votes liberal, spent a year driving across the country to sit with the people his image of the other side told him to avoid: political rallies for the other side, rural churches, a convent. What he found was that at a rally in Minnesota, the people in red hats got curious about him for one reason only: he was curious about them first. Deep curiosity, he says, wants to know the person, and is willing to be changed by the answer.

The best conversations I have been part of, at Google, at Stanford and at our own dinner table, have that same shape. I call it evolutionary dialogue: the confidence to express a point of view, and the humility to admit its limits. You hold your view firmly enough to say it out loud, and openly enough that it might be upgraded.

There is a lot in the world out there that I cannot influence, but my response to it is always mine. That is the heart I want to send back to the man with the middle finger. Not agreement. Interest.

Reply and tell me what you found on the other side of the switch. I read every one.

Listen now →

Think of one person you love who sees the world differently than you do. Forward this letter and add one line of your own: I would love to hear how you see it.

If that man and I ever meet again, he will get another heart.

P.S. If you want to practice how to better respond in difficult situations, Mindstate Moments is for you. It arrives every morning with one thought, one shift, and one small ritual that begins with Today, I choose to. It is free, and your first one comes the morning after you sign up. Start tomorrow's moment →