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We rarely see people as they are; we see the story we’ve built about them.

Projection can be flattering, not just unfair—we hand people wisdom or warmth they never claimed.

Because of naive realism, our interpretations feel like plain fact, which makes them hard to catch.

The aim isn’t to stop projecting but to notice it, by asking what we’re adding to what we see.

It took me about 90 seconds to decide who he was.

A new colleague, first meeting. Something in the way he ran the room—didn’t smile, answered a question a beat too fast, held eye contact a little too long. Arrogant, I thought, and the verdict closed before I’d heard him say anything that warranted it. For months afterward, I related to that version of him. Polite, guarded, faintly cold. I was careful around a man I had essentially invented.

He wasn’t arrogant. He was terrified. He’d walked into that job convinced everyone in the building was smarter than he was, and the things I’d read as arrogance—the speed, the unbroken eye contact—were the posture of someone bracing for exposure. I hadn’t been reading him at all. I’d been reading a character I cast in a role, and then quietly resenting him for playing it.

I only have language for what I did because of a film I saw far too young to understand.

The film is Being There. Peter Sellers, 1979. Subtle humor, almost no action, long pauses, a strange, gentle current moving underneath everything. Many people watch it now and shrug; it isn’t paced for us. It doesn’t shout or chase your attention. It asks you to sit still long enough........

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