Every one has a high opinion of himself, especially those who have least ground for it... Hope gives rise to extravagant promises which experience does not fulfil... The wise man anticipates such errors: he may always hope for the best, but he always expects the worst, so as to receive what comes with equanimity.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Accurate self-assessment is rarer than it should be, because almost everyone rates themselves above the evidence, and the least capable often rate themselves highest. The correction is a specific mental posture: hope for the best while expecting the worst, so that a good outcome arrives as a gain and a bad one as something already prepared for. This is not pessimism; it is the equanimity that comes from having priced the downside in advance. The maxim adds a caution against the opposite error too: aim high enough to reach your potential, but not so high on inflated self-belief that you misjudge your actual starting position and set off in the wrong direction. Know your true sphere, and you can reconcile a real ambition with a real assessment of where you stand.
Practice
- Adopt the double posture on anything uncertain: hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and you meet either with equanimity (maxim 151 rehearses the trouble).
- Calibrate self-assessment against evidence, not feeling; the gap between how good you think you are and how good the record says you are is worth closing (maxim 89 builds the mirror).
- Aim high but from an accurate starting point; ambition built on an inflated view of your position sets off in the wrong direction.
Use this when
- Use this at the start of ventures and careers, when self-belief runs highest and the record is thinnest.
- Use it before any outcome you cannot control; the prepared-for-worst posture converts disappointment into something already handled.
Ignore this when
- Don't let expecting the worst curdle into gloom that stops you acting; it is a preparation, not a mood (maxim 167 keeps the bold heart).
- Don't deflate ambition into timidity; the maxim says aim high, only from honest ground, not that you should aim low.
A picture of it
The first-time entrepreneur builds his plan on the version of himself he wishes were true: everything will work, customers will come, the timeline will hold. When reality arrives slower and harder, the gap between the wished-for and the real becomes a well of daily discouragement. A second founder, equally ambitious, ran the double posture from the start, hoped for the strong case and planned for the weak one, and when the weak one arrived, she met it with equanimity because she had already priced it in. Same ambition, same market. One was ambushed by reality; the other had reserved a room for it.
Hope for the best, expect the worst, aim high from honest ground. Equanimity is just the downside priced in advance.