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Zadie Smith on the Courage to Be More Than Yourself

Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, modeling the reality of another into your own in order to fathom it. I have

Empathy is difficult

It requires skill and effort. It can be taught. And it’s worth prioritizing. When we wing it, allocate little time to it or assume it’s a side effect of our work, we diminish the effort and blur our focus. “I wonder what it’s like to be you” is part of what makes us human, but