How much depends on the person. The interior must be at least as much as the exterior. There are natures all frontage, like houses that for want of means have the portico of a palace leading to the rooms of a cottage.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The palace-portico person survives entrances brilliantly: the confident summary, the borrowed framework, the phrase that sounds like experience. Then comes the second conversation, or the third question, and the flow of words stops, as the quote puts it, where there is no spring of thoughts. In an age optimised for frontage, profiles, pitches, first impressions engineered to gleam, thoroughness has become a rarity worth its construction cost. Interior at least equal to exterior is the whole building code: know your subject past the summary, your numbers past the headline, your craft past the demo. The prudent always look inside, and they are the only audience that decides anything.
Practice
- Build interior before frontage: on any claim you make publicly, be able to survive three follow-up questions from an expert.
- Renovate one room a year: a subject taken from talking-point depth to actual-competence depth. Compounding does the rest.
- Test yourself with teaching: explaining a thing to a sharp junior locates the cottage rooms faster than any self-assessment.
Use this when
- Use this before the arenas where the second question is guaranteed: interviews, due diligence, expert committees.
- Use it reading others, kindly: let people reveal their depth across conversations before you rely on the portico.
Ignore this when
- Don't neglect frontage entirely; an unmarked palace gets no visitors (maxim 130 owns that wing).
- Don't demand encyclopaedic depth of everyone on everything; thorough means solid where you claim, not infinite everywhere.
A picture of it
The consultant's deck was flawless: frameworks, case names, a diagram for every doubt. The client's operations head, a woman of few slides, asked her third question, the one about what actually breaks on the factory floor at month-end, and the room watched the portico run out of palace. The retainer went instead to a smaller firm whose partner answered that question with a story from a plant he had personally unclogged. Frontage had won the meeting. Interior won the year.
Build the rooms before the entrance. Visitors eventually come inside.