Most men do not esteem what they understand, and venerate what they do not see. To be valued things should cost dear: what is not understood becomes overrated... Give them no time for blame: occupy them with understanding your drift...
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
There is a paradox in how people value things: what they fully understand they tend to take for granted, and what remains a little beyond them they venerate. Explain your work down to the last detail and you hand everyone the tools to grade it cheaply and find it ordinary; leave a margin of the not-fully-explained and it keeps a certain standing. This is not a licence for deliberate obscurity, which has its own dangers, and the counsel warns against excess in both directions. With genuinely sensible people, plain sense holds its own and needs no mystery. But with most audiences, a degree of restraint in explanation, enough to occupy them with grasping your drift rather than blaming it, protects the value of what you have done. Do not lay it all bare.
Practice
- Keep a margin unexplained; what people fully grasp they take for granted, and what stays slightly beyond them they respect (maxim 3 keeps matters in suspense).
- Do not hand critics the tools to grade you cheaply; over-explaining invites the blame that restraint would have prevented.
- Match the dose to the audience; with the genuinely sensible plain sense is enough, and only most audiences need the restraint.
Use this when
- Use this in presenting expertise; a little held back preserves the standing that full disclosure spends.
- Use it when you notice yourself over-justifying; the extra explanation usually lowers the value rather than raising it.
Ignore this when
- Don't slide into deliberate obscurity to seem deep; that is a different fault, and confusion venerated collapses the moment it is understood (maxim 216 warns against it).
- Don't withhold what people genuinely need to act; the restraint is on grading, not on the information required to do the work.
A picture of it
Eager to prove his rigour, a consultant walks a client through every assumption, every caveat, every step of his reasoning, and watches the engagement lose value in real time: given the full machinery, the client second-guesses each part and concludes the work was obvious all along. On the next project he presents the conclusion with the reasoning available but not force-fed, keeping a margin, and the same client treats the same quality of work as authoritative. He had not been building trust by explaining everything. He had been handing over the red pen.
What people fully see, they stop valuing. Keep a margin unexplained, and do not hand every critic the grading pen.