You should keep your desires sealed up, still more your defects. All go wrong sometimes, but the wise try to hide the errors, but fools boast of them. Reputation depends more on what is hidden than on what is done.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
This is not a licence to cover up wrongdoing; read it as a rule about drafts. Everyone's work contains failed attempts, bad first versions, and private embarrassments, and the choice is whether those enter the public record. Some people narrate every stumble in real time, mistaking it for honesty, and slowly build a reputation made of their own worst moments. Others correct in private and present the finished thing. Same error rate, opposite standing. The line that matters: hide the drafts, never the damage. Errors that cost someone else must be disclosed and repaired, and there the maxim does not apply at all.
Practice
- Sort mistakes at the moment they happen: private stumble (fix it, say nothing) or consequential error (disclose fast, fully, first).
- Stop narrating your process to audiences who only need the outcome; work in progress deserves a small trusted circle, not a broadcast.
- Correct your own record before others read it: the re-checked file, the pre-empted mistake, the silent second pass.
Use this when
- Use this on the mistakes that harmed nobody: the wrong draft, the abandoned idea, the awkward first attempt at something new.
- Use it in public forums where every self-deprecating admission becomes permanent and searchable.
Ignore this when
- Don't use it on errors that touch money, safety, or another person's work. Those get reported by you, before anyone finds them (maxim 214 forbids the cover-up chain).
- Don't extend it to a persona with no visible flaws; that invites the hunt (maxim 83 keeps one crumb on display).
A picture of it
Two surgeons of equal skill discuss cases at the weekly meeting. One narrates every uncertainty aloud, the hesitation on approach, the suture she would redo, the anaesthetic dose she second-guessed. Her outcomes are excellent and her reputation somehow shaky. The other brings the same self-criticism to the same meeting in a different form: what she changed, what she now does, the checklist she wrote. Identical honesty, one processed. The department trusts both. It refers the difficult cases to the second.
Fix the errors in private. Report the ones that hurt somebody. Publish neither your drafts nor your excuses.