Bad words even without bad deeds are bad enough: good words with bad deeds are worse. One cannot dine off words, which are wind... Words should be the pledges of work, and, like pawn-tickets, have their market price. Trees that bear leaves but not fruit have usually no pith.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
People come in two economies, and telling them apart early saves years. Some pay in words: promises, enthusiasm, fluent intentions, all of it wind that cannot be eaten. Others pay in deeds, and their words are pledges backed by a record of delivery. The dangerous type is good words with bad deeds, the charming non-deliverer, worse than the plainly unreliable because the charm buys repeated chances the record never earns. The practical instrument is memory: track what a person actually did against what they said, and price their future promises accordingly. A promise from a proven deliverer is money. The same promise from a leaf-heavy tree is shade, pleasant and worth nothing when you are hungry.
Practice
- Keep a private ledger of said-versus-did for the people you rely on; the gap is the truest character reference there is.
- Discount fluent promises from unproven sources; enthusiasm is not delivery, and the most charming promiser often has the worst record.
- Become a man of deeds yourself: let your own words be pledges you always redeem, and your plain sentence will outweigh others' speeches (maxim 202 pairs the two).
Use this when
- Use this before depending on anyone's commitment: vendors, partners, the colleague who volunteers eagerly and delivers rarely.
- Use it to reallocate trust; move weight toward the plain deliverer and away from the fluent promiser, regardless of who is more pleasant.
Ignore this when
- Don't dismiss all words; the man of deeds who also communicates well is the complete one, and words are how work gets coordinated.
- Don't judge on a single miss; the ledger is a pattern over time, and everyone has one bad delivery (maxim 169 knows the miss gets over-weighted).
A picture of it
A founder has two suppliers bidding. One is magnetic in the meeting, full of vision and warm assurance; the other is almost dull, answering only what is asked. The founder checks the ledger that matters, not the pitch but the record, and finds the dull one has never missed a delivery in nine years while the magnetic one leaves a trail of charmed clients and late shipments. He signs the dull one. The vision was leaves. The nine clean years were fruit, and only one of the two could actually be eaten.
Judge people by the fruit, not the foliage. Words are wind until the deeds have been paying for years.