Few live without some weak point... yet a single cloud can hide the whole of the sun. There are likewise patches on our reputation which ill-will soon finds out and is continually noticing.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Unfair but structural: excellence is expected and defects are news. A hundred clean files earn silence; one shortcut earns a nickname that outlives three transfers. Ill-will does not survey your whole record, it patrols your weak point, returning to it in every discussion of your name. So the priority is asymmetric. Before adding one more excellence to an already strong record, remove or repair the standing flaw, the temper, the deadline habit, the loose remark after two drinks, because that flaw is currently the headline of your file, and headlines do not read the body text.
Practice
- Identify your patch: the one thing critics would raise first. If unsure, you alone don't know it; ask someone safe.
- Spend one quarter on repair before spending years on further polish; subtraction of a flaw outperforms addition of a strength.
- Where a flaw cannot be removed, manage its exposure: the disorganised brilliant man hires order; the blunt one writes less and calls more.
Use this when
- Use this before promotion season and any public elevation; visibility multiplies the patch along with the sun.
- Use it early in careers, yours or a junior's, before a small habit becomes the permanent nickname.
Ignore this when
- Don't let it curdle into perfectionist paralysis; a small deliberate imperfection even disarms envy (maxim 83 argues that side).
- Don't police others' patches by this standard; the maxim is a mirror, not a scoring rubric for colleagues.
A picture of it
An officer with fifteen excellent years has one known flaw: he shouts under pressure, perhaps four times a year. In his promotion discussion, nobody lists the fifteen years; someone mentions the shouting inside the first two minutes, and heads nod. Four incidents a year, and they have become the file's summary. The colleague who fixed his equivalent habit at forty is described, accurately and unfairly, as flawless.
Your strengths compete with everyone else's strengths. Your flaw competes with nothing. It just gets remembered, every time your name comes up.