Meet People Where They Are

We are all strangers in a strange land — each of us arrives unchosen into a world we did not make, and no one can be fully read from the outside.

I learned it at home. My children came from the same stock — same parents, same house — and came out three different people. One works everything through on the inside; the others need their hands on a thing before it is real. If the tightest group there is comes out unalike, then stock predicts nothing: not the blood, not the school, not the résumé. The marker gives you the category. It never gives you the person.

But almost every system we use to sort people runs on markers — and it is fast, and confident, and wrong in a way that leaves no trace, because the person it skipped never shows up in the results. You keep who you picked. You never meet who you passed.

So there is one honest way to know anyone: go to where they stand. Understand the shape of them — how they are actually built — and the why underneath, the reason they get up in the morning. A résumé can be performed; the why cannot, not for long. It is the one thing stock cannot fake and the storm cannot move.

That is not softness. It is accuracy — and it is why the best people are so often the ones the screen skipped.

Meet people where they are.