Simone Weil, writing in the 1940s, argued that the deepest form of attention is not concentration — it's a kind of self-evacuation. To genuinely attend to another person, you have to temporarily stop being so committed to your own conclusions. She called it 'waiting on' rather than 'grasping at.' What strikes me about this is how directly it cuts against the way ambitious leaders typically understand humility. Most high-achievers treat humility as a managed posture — a way of signaling openness while privately maintaining their existing map of the situation. Weil's version is structurally different: it requires actually emptying the cognitive space where your agenda lives, so that what the other person is saying can arrive without being immediately sorted into your existing categories. The practical difference shows up in conversation. When your child or your direct report is speaking, there are usually two things happening simultaneously: what they're saying, and your quiet process of fitting it into a story you already half-believe. Weil's attention demands suspending the second process — not forever, but long enough for something genuinely new to reach you. That brief suspension is where real humility lives. Not in the words you choose afterward, but in the quality of the gap before you respond.

In your last significant conversation at home, at what point did you stop actually hearing and start composing your reply?

Drawing from French phenomenological philosophy and Christian mysticism (Simone Weil) — Simone Weil (Waiting for God, 1951; 'Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies,' 1942)