Moshe Leib of Sassov, an eighteenth-century Hasidic teacher, offered a principle that sounds simple until you sit with it: you cannot truly love God if you don't first learn to love the person standing in front of you. He wasn't being sentimental. He was making a structural argument — that the capacity for attention, patience, and genuine interest is a single muscle, and wherever you let it go slack, it goes slack everywhere. Most high-performing people discover this the hard way. The family dinner table is where the muscle gets tested in real time, with no strategic upside, no performance review, no audience. And that's precisely what makes it the sharpest training ground available. Martin Buber, who drew directly on this Hasidic lineage in developing his philosophy of I-Thou encounter, argued that genuine meeting requires you to be fully present to the specific irreducible personhood of the other — not their role, not their need, not what they represent to your plans. The person across from you at dinner tonight is not a smaller version of a direct report. They have their own interior life that doesn't require your agenda. Practicing that quality of encounter at home — unhurried, without the scaffolding of authority — is what makes it possible when it actually matters in the room where decisions get made.

What would the people you live with say you're actually like when you arrive home on a Friday — and would that match how you describe yourself as a leader?

Drawing from Hasidic Jewish Philosophy (Moshe Leib of Sassov) crossed with Martin Buber's dialogical philosophy — Moshe Leib of Sassov (c. 1745–1807) in dialogue with Martin Buber (I and Thou, 1923)