Their native land is always a stepmother to great talents: envy flourishes there on its native soil, and they remember one's small beginnings rather than the greatness one has reached... Everything foreign is respected, partly because it comes from afar... The statue on the altar is never reverenced by him who knew it as a trunk in the garden.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Familiarity discounts value. The people who knew you as a beginner have a fixed image of you, and it does not update; they remember the log and cannot quite see the statue, however far you have come. Add local envy, which flourishes on home soil, and your own place can be the hardest one in which to be fully valued. The maxim's counsel is transplanting: sometimes the same abilities that go unregarded at home are prized elsewhere, precisely because the new place sees the finished statue without the memory of the log. This is also the honest explanation of why outside experts get believed over equally able insiders. Before concluding you are underappreciated, ask whether you are merely under-transplanted, and whether a change of ground would let your actual worth be seen.
Practice
- If you are consistently undervalued where you are known, consider that the ground, not the worth, may be the problem; the same abilities can be prized elsewhere.
- Weigh a change of setting, city, employer, or field when local memory of your beginnings caps how you are seen.
- Use the outsider effect honestly; if your own institution discounts you, the credibility you lack at home may be available a border away (maxim 196 reads the favourable ground).
Use this when
- Use this when local envy or a fixed early reputation is capping your standing despite real growth.
- Use it deciding between staying where you are known and moving where you would be freshly assessed on current merit.
Ignore this when
- Don't transplant to flee every difficulty; the move resets your soil too, and the network and goodwill built over years stay behind (maxim 113 stocked that winter).
- Don't assume the grass is greener without checking; some careers compound best where they are rooted, and the move must be judged, not romanticised.
A picture of it
A researcher is, at her own institution, still "the student who trained here," her senior work discounted by colleagues who remember her nervous first presentations. The same papers, presented at a conference abroad, are received as the work of an authority, because that room sees only the finished scholar and carries no memory of the log. She moves, and the standing that her home institution could not grant her arrives almost immediately elsewhere, on the identical record. The worth had never been the problem. The ground had, and transplanting was the only thing that let the statue be seen as a statue.
Where they knew you as a beginner, they may never see the finished you. Sometimes new ground is the only way to be valued for what you have become.