By gaining their good-will you gain men's good opinion. Some trust so much to merit that they neglect grace, but wise men know that Service Road without a lift from favour is a long way indeed. Good-will facilitates and supplies everything... The whole difficulty is to gain good-will; to keep it is easy.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The meritocrat's error is treating goodwill as corruption's cousin, something the excellent should not need. The correction is unsentimental: goodwill is a force multiplier that supplies what you lack and forgives what you fumble, and it does not see defects because it is not looking for them, while its absence audits everything. The clean version is not flattery or favour-trading; it is the accumulated wish, in many chests, that things go well for you, earned through courtesy, help given, credit shared, and interest taken in others' matters. Merit decides what your work deserves. Goodwill decides how far and fast it travels, and, as the quote notes, the buying is the hard part; the keeping is nearly free.
Practice
- Invest in goodwill before you need velocity: the months when you require nothing from anyone are the buying season (maxim 113's summer, applied to people).
- Take visible interest in matters that are not yours: the colleague's project, the junior's exam, the peer's crisis; wished-well people wish well back.
- Watch the merit-only trap in yourself: if your work is excellent and your progress slow, the missing lift is usually this one.
Use this when
- Use this alongside excellence, never instead of it; goodwill moves what merit builds, and moves nothing hollow for long (maxim 175 audits).
- Use it across the full org chart; the goodwill of assistants and operators moves files that seniors only sign.
Ignore this when
- Don't purchase goodwill with your standards; the wish you want is "may he do well", not "he lets things slide".
- Don't neglect the keeping entirely; easy is not zero, and goodwill assumed dead by neglect converts to its opposite with interest.
A picture of it
Two auditors of identical competence sat for the same empanelment. The committee found their files indistinguishable, so the decision travelled, as such decisions do, along a different rail: three members had small, warm data on the first, a courtesy at a seminar, prompt help on a technical query two years ago, a junior of theirs he had guided unasked. Nobody could cite anything about the second except the file. The first man's merit got him to the tie. What broke the tie had been deposited, in minutes-long instalments, over a decade in which he thought nobody was counting.
Excellence gets you considered. Being wished well gets you chosen. Fund both accounts.