Daily practice · 2 minutes
Looking through someone else's eyes.
A two-minute exercise in imagining the day of someone you care about, from the inside. The point isn't to guess right. It's to ask.
What you do.
1. Pick one person in your life. Not someone you already understand intuitively — pick someone whose inner life is a little opaque to you. A parent. A friend going through something. A colleague you don't talk to much.
2. Set a timer for two minutes. Close your eyes.
3. Imagine their morning from the inside. The room they woke up in. The first thought they had. The thing on their to-do list that's nagging at them. The person they wish would call.
4. Don't try to be accurate. Try to be curious. The exercise is not about correctness — it's about training your attention to take another person's perspective automatically.
Why it builds empathy.
Empathy fails most often not because people don't care, but because they don't have access to the other person's point of view. They assume. They fill in with their own. The Roman Krznaric formulation is that empathy is "the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person."
Most of us are bad at this without practice. The good news is it improves quickly. Two minutes a day, for a few weeks, and you'll startle yourself by spontaneously imagining someone else's perspective in real time.
If you have a few more minutes.
Send the person a message. Not a generic "thinking of you" — something specific that shows you imagined what their day might look like. "I bet that meeting ran long" or "I hope the presentation went better than expected." You'll often be wrong about the specifics. They'll usually appreciate the attempt.
Pair this with the too-busy-to-notice guide — it's the same attentional muscle.