You saw the act, not the inside

A coworker doesn't answer your message all afternoon. A driver cuts the line at the dock. The new hire keeps making the same mistake. In each case you know exactly one thing: what happened. Then, without noticing the jump, you fill in the rest. Ignoring me. Thinks he's better than the rest of us. Doesn't care. You watched the deed. You invented the motive.

Marcus Aurelius, running an empire full of people who annoyed him, kept reminding himself how little he could actually see. Of another person's mind, he wrote, the most you can learn is "whether he has acted ignorantly or with knowledge" (Meditations 9.16, Long) — and even that you're guessing at. The silence, the cut line, the repeated error: those are real, observable, recorded. The contempt and the disrespect you read into them live nowhere but in your own head.

This is the week's move, and it starts here. Reading people without mind-reading means holding yourself to what you actually witnessed, and treating the story about why as the unverified thing it is.

You don't have to be a mind reader to work with people. You have to stop pretending you are one.