In the companion piece to this one, Know Thyself: Part 1, I wrote about the ancient instruction to know yourself, and how self-knowledge is what allows you to actually see other people instead of projecting onto them. That’s the foundation.
But there’s another side to it that I think about just as often. Other people are also a way in.
The ones who irritate you, the ones you can’t stop admiring, the ones you’re drawn to without quite knowing why, they’re not random. They’re showing you something about yourself that you haven’t fully named yet, and if they’re getting your attention, there’s a reason for it.
Sometimes it takes years for the recognition to arrive.
I remember so clearly going through a phase during my single years where I kept lightening my naturally dark brown hair with highlights, little by little, to the point where I was practically blonde. I didn’t realize how light my hair actually became. I did not intend to go that light. Despite all the highlights, if you had asked me what color my hair was, I would’ve said brown.
Oddly, I also found myself noticeably gravitating toward men with really dark hair, though I only saw that pattern in hindsight. In fact, I wouldn’t even give a guy a second look unless he had jet black hair, and no dark-haired guy would return the interest. Hmm. The whole thing was a little strange.
Still not realizing what was going on, I decided to dye my hair a beautiful, dark rich brown and get a long layered, angled bob just to change it up. I loved it. That night, my friends and I went out for a few drinks, and at one point, my friend pointed out, “Hey, you actually talked to a guy with light hair for a change.”
What was that supposed to mean? It was only then that I realized I was no longer searching for something I already had.
A small story, a little silly, but it stayed with me because the mechanism behind it is the same one that shows up in much bigger places.
We chase what we’ve unconsciously erased in ourselves. We’re drawn to what we won’t give ourselves permission to be. And the people we’re attracted to, or irritated by, are often holding up a version of something we’ve unknowingly denied.
The same was true for me with the field of marketing, though it took longer to see.
For most of my career I worked on the research side of pharma, where I was comfortable in something analytical, structured, and evidence-based. When I’d watch marketing teams do their work, from the outside, it looked like art to me. And because of the stories I told myself, I’d put art in the hobby category. Something I would never do today.
What I couldn’t see at the time was that I was doing the same thing to myself. I had a creative side I had set aside as I became an adult, and I didn’t trust it. I didn’t think it counted. Real contribution, in the framework I had built for myself, came from science, and the creative side of things felt like something separate.
So when I looked at marketing, I wasn’t really looking at marketing. I was looking at the part of myself I’d refused to honor, dressed up in someone else’s job description, and I dismissed it the same way I’d dismissed that part of me.
Then I wrote a book, REFLECT. After I wrote it, I hit the marketing phase, and I had to learn how to reach people, how to find the language that reaches others, how to understand what moves someone enough to pay attention, to keep reading, to come back. I started paying attention to it the way I once paid attention to chemistry.
That’s when I finally got it. I came to see marketing differently. It’s a people science, and you get to be creative. It’s the discipline of understanding what makes humans feel seen, what makes them trust, what makes them act. There’s craft in it, there’s discipline in it, and there’s something genuinely beautiful in it when it’s done well.
The reason I could finally see all of that wasn’t because marketing changed, it was because I had finally accepted that art and science weren’t opposites in me. The creative side I’d dismissed for decades was a legitimate part of who I was, and the moment I let that be true, the field I’d dismissed for decades became visible to me as something whole.
Same exact move as the hair. I wasn’t searching for something I already had, and I wasn’t honoring something I already was.
This is what I mean when I say other people are a doorway into knowing yourself. The same is true of other things, as with marketing. The strong reactions, in either direction, are signals. It could be the colleague who frustrates you, the leader you can’t stop watching, the friend whose confidence makes you uncomfortable, the discipline you’ve been dismissing, the trait you keep being drawn to, or the behavior in someone else that you can’t stop noticing. It can even be a whole movement, a political preference, a color of clothes, whatever. None of it is random.
Some of it is just preference, and that’s fine. But the reactions with a little heat behind them, the ones that linger, or ones you can’t even explain, those are worth reflecting on. Then you ask yourself a few questions.
What is it about this person that’s pulling something in me?
What might they be showing me about what I haven’t claimed in myself?
What have I been searching for outside of me that’s been here the whole time?
The first piece in this pair, Know Thyself: Part 1, was about turning inward to see others more clearly, and this one is the reverse, but they aren’t separate practices. They’re the same one, like alternating current in an electrical circuit, one direction needs the other to work. Self-knowledge isn’t something you do in isolation, it happens in contact with other people, in the reactions they pull from you, in the patterns you keep noticing in who draws you in and who sets you off.
The mirror is everywhere. The question is whether you’re willing to look at what it’s actually showing you.