A rambling anecdote about how I discovered what I was good at.

I was 13 years old. My parents had broken up a few years earlier. Dad was unfaithful—an unremarkable thing in marriages, sadly—but it was more the petty obsession he had with his younger mistress that hurt Mom so deeply. They never would have broken up otherwise. It was an acrimonious split. You’ve probably noticed I haven’t used the term "divorce." My parents didn't formally end their marriage until many years later. It was one of those situations—disorganized, sloppy—their emotional codependence stretched all the way up to my father's passing years later.

My parents had a dramatic courtship. They met while working as probation officers in the early 1960s. Both were married to other people at the time. But as the years passed, my mother cultivated a close friendship with her first husband and even became friends with my father's ex. She would talk on the phone with her at least a couple of times a month, up until my mother's passing. But this post isn't about that. I mention these things to offer a little context as to how I was conditioned to observe people's behavior. After all, our eyes tend to find the dramatic. Early experiences—fraught with tension, betrayal, and even danger—helped me define and shape my perception of others. The trauma and uncertainty of that time imbued me with a strange capacity to quickly discern the essence of other human beings.

What is “essence,” though? Is it "character," "competence," "faith," or "work"? Determining what is at the core of a person's being represents the true eternal question, more so than even the meaning of life itself.

Most people inhabit gray areas—strong and weak, kind and cruel, wicked and virtuous. Perhaps it's the balance sheet that God looks at at the end of our days that determines who we truly were when our book finally closes. I don't know. But I pity those who perceive others as mere products of their environment—as animals driven by behaviors we don't truly understand. If psychology has taught us anything, it's that our capacity for introspection—our ability to understand the antecedents that formed our inner rhythms and then mold and shape future behavior—means that we are not slaves to environmental influences. We actually have the capacity to learn from example and experience. Understanding the things that have shaped us is key to determining our strengths, our weaknesses, that which we see clearly, and our blind spots as well.

Anyway, let me circle back to the anecdote at the core of this writing (be patient, I’m getting there). My father had been living outside of our home for a number of years. I can't remember him spending much time with me up until that point, but when my parents broke up, things changed, and my father was in my life every single day. At the time, I was very happy about our time together. But upon reflection, I see it was mundane and unproductive. There were good things, though. He took me to the movies all the time, instilling in me a love for the arts and storytelling. Eventually, I made my own movie and built an avocation as a screenwriter. But his monopolizing of my time also left me isolated for a portion of my youth.

He had a weekend business that allowed him a lot of idle time. That business also kept him from self-actualizing. He was perhaps the smartest, most charming man I ever met—he had earned a master's from Columbia in political science and even went to law school for a couple of semesters—but he fell into a niche. It was something that required little innovation, ingenuity, or intelligence. There were years when it was highly profitable and years when it was positively abysmal. And my father seemed content to ride out those periods with little notion of how to change the tide. He was a product of his environment and didn't seem to learn from it.

When I was 19 years old, I fell into Dad’s weekend business after he suffered a heart attack. The trappings of that place—the free time it permitted, the initial ease of income, and the generally pleasant environment—made me complacent, just like him. Later, I would decide to leave that prison and bet on myself when I entered the field of psychology.

I view myself as a work in progress, determined to discover my own essence and raise my game—committed to being someone who refuses an easy life and instead builds myself up through a challenging one. Perhaps that’s why I chose to be a therapist. Is there anything more challenging than helping others move past internal limitations and external traumas?

Still, as I began my career and discovered my aptitude for it, I often wondered how my life experiences instilled in me the ability to quickly identify the essence of the person sitting across from me, as well as the humility to accept that, while experience told me I was likely correct, I could always be wrong. Observing people—in family, in business, in life—made me a student of the human essence. Which brings me back to that day when I was 13 years old.

My father and I were walking up to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant on 86th Street in Brooklyn. I saw an old man sitting in the front window with a cigar in his mouth, gazing blankly at the avenue beyond. His appearance was perfectly benign. And while I only glanced at him for a second or two, a chilling thought entered my mind: This man is a murderer.

Dad and I went in to eat. The restaurant was empty—except for that old man, who turned out to be the owner. He was quite pleasant, actually. He came over and sat with us while we ate. It soon occurred to me that my initial perception may have been distorted. How could this kind old man who runs a little Italian eatery be a killer?

Many weeks later, my father and I went back to the same restaurant, this time with my father's friend, Paul. Dad often told me, "Paul knows all the ‘boys’," because Paul lived on the periphery of mafia life. Over dinner, Paul entertained us with a lot of stories about his time at the fringes of that world, some crazy experiences growing up in Brooklyn, etc. That old man from last time came over at one point, chatted with us for a bit, and disappeared into the nearby kitchen. And that’s when it happened.

When the old guy was out of earshot, Paul turned to us and said, sotto voce, "You wouldn’t know it by looking at that guy, but when he was younger, he was a contract killer for the mafia!” Paul went on to tell us how the old man had once owned a funeral parlor, even laughing about how the guy had hosted services for many of the people he had killed.

So, at the age of thirteen, a passing glance through a window revealed to me the heart of another human being. Throughout my life, I often meet people and quickly form a perception about their character, about their inner truth, and I’m usually right. Along with training and experience, the ability to quickly see into a person’s heart has made me very good at what I do.

If life has taught me anything, it’s that when we combine our innate abilities with wisdom and skill gleaned through education, we place ourselves on a path to being great in our own way.