There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled. To know how to make use of every one is useful knowledge. Wise men appreciate all men, for they see the good in each and know how hard it is to make anything good. Fools depreciate all men.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Appreciation is a practical faculty, not a soft virtue. The person who can see what each individual is genuinely good at can deploy people well, learn from anyone, and build things that the depreciator, who sees only flaws, never can. Two truths anchor it. Everyone can teach you something, so the habit of dismissing people wholesale costs you the specific thing each one knows. And no one is so excellent that they cannot be excelled, so admiration should never become the kind of awe that stops you learning past your teacher. The fool depreciates all men because it feels like discernment; it is actually a self-inflicted poverty, cutting him off from the good that is scattered, unevenly, through almost everyone.
Practice
- Look for the specific thing each person is genuinely good at; the habit of finding it makes you a better judge of people and a better user of talent (maxim 34 finds the strong point).
- Learn from everyone, including those you outrank or dislike; each holds some piece of knowledge or skill you lack.
- Keep admiration from becoming awe; respect a master and still aim to be excelled, since no one is beyond being surpassed (maxim 75 emulates rather than worships).
Use this when
- Use this as a leader assembling teams; the ability to see what each person does well is the core of deploying people effectively.
- Use it against your own cynicism; if you find yourself depreciating everyone, you are describing your own poverty, not their quality.
Ignore this when
- Don't inflate appreciation into indiscriminate praise; seeing the good in each is not the same as rating everyone equally (maxim 41 keeps the calibration).
- Don't let appreciation blind you to real faults; recognising a person's gift does not mean ignoring their flaws in a decision that depends on them (maxim 157 still reads character).
A picture of it
A department has one manager who describes almost everyone as mediocre and another who can tell you exactly what each person on the floor is genuinely good at, including people the first manager wrote off. When a hard cross-functional problem lands, the first manager has no one to deploy, because in his telling no one is any good. The second assembles a team in an afternoon, drawing the detail-person, the negotiator, the calm-in-a-crisis one, each to the part that fits them. The talent was identical on both floors. One manager could see it and the other had blinded himself, and called the blindness high standards.
See what each person is good at. The one who finds no good in anyone has described his own poverty, not theirs.