Everything is good or everything is bad according to the votes they gain. What one pursues another persecutes... There is no defect which is not affected by some, nor need we lose heart if things please not some, for others will appreciate them... You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Taste is a map of tribes, not a measure of worth. The hobby your office finds eccentric has a national association; the career your relatives question has its own conferences; the film one room worships, the next room walks out of. Once you truly absorb this, two burdens drop at once. Mockery loses its sting, because the mockers are one constituency, not a verdict. And applause loses its command over you, because it too is one constituency. The closing instruction is the point of the whole maxim: build your standing on more than any single audience, fashion, or moment, and no single vote can bankrupt you.
Practice
- When mocked for a genuine interest, find its tribe instead of defending it to the wrong room; the energy spent converting scoffers is better spent among appreciators.
- Diversify your audiences the way you would investments: work, craft, community; approval concentrated in one place is approval that can be withdrawn in one place.
- Before abandoning anything to laughter, check who is laughing; a jury that has never cared about the subject is not a jury.
Use this when
- Use this when your interests or plans meet ridicule from people who were never going to be their audience.
- Use it to hold steady through fashion cycles; what the market persecutes this year, it often pursues in five.
Ignore this when
- Don't use it to dismiss all criticism as tribal; some laughter comes from people who know the subject, and that kind is data (maxim 84 mines it).
- Don't secede from every audience; independence of any one vote is the aim, not contempt for voting.
A picture of it
For years the office had one joke about him: the grown man who spent Sundays photographing birds. He stopped explaining and found the people who did not need the explanation, a records group, a wetland survey, an editor short of good images. The same photographs the lunch table scrolled past began appearing with his name in places the lunch table had never been. The office still makes the joke, more carefully now. He never needed their vote. He had only needed to stop campaigning for it.
Half the world laughs at the other half. Choose whose laughter you work for, and stop counting the rest.