He is a great man who never allows himself to be influenced by the impressions of others... To know one's disposition and to allow for it, even going to the other extreme so as to find the juste milieu between nature and art. Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Where maxim 8 governed the hot passions, this one governs the daily weather: the humours, in the old vocabulary, the background moods that colour judgment while pretending to be judgment. The pessimist's Tuesday verdict and the optimist's Friday verdict are both weather reports filed as analysis. The remedy is precise: know your disposition and correct for it like an instrument error, even deliberately overcorrecting, the gloomy discounting their gloom, the buoyant taxing their enthusiasm, until the reading is true. This is self-knowledge with a use: not the diary kind, the calibration kind. The great man he describes is not moodless; he simply knows which of today's opinions belong to him and which belong to the weather.
Practice
- Chart your own climate honestly: the hour, day, and season when your judgment runs hot or cold. Big decisions get scheduled OUT of the extremes.
- Apply the instrument correction: if you know you read situations dark, add back ten percent before acting; if bright, subtract it.
- Re-examine any strong opinion that arrived with a mood; re-open it in different weather and see what survives the climate change.
Use this when
- Use this on recurring decisions, appraisals, portfolio reviews, difficult letters, where mood contamination compounds silently over years.
- Use it in pairs and teams: staff your counterweight; the planner and the plunger correct each other's standing error (maxim 108's principle).
Ignore this when
- Don't correct into paralysis; the goal is a truer reading, not a person who distrusts every reading he takes.
- Don't use "it was the mood" to escape owning decisions; weather explains the error, it does not sign the apology for you.
A picture of it
He noticed the pattern only when his wife named it: every resignation drafted in this house has been drafted on a Sunday night. The audit of his own archive confirmed it, years of Sunday-evening verdicts, Monday-morning retractions. Now the rule is mechanical and slightly humiliating and completely effective: nothing about career, money, or family may be decided after eight on Sundays. The mood still arrives on schedule, files its familiar complaint, and finds the office closed.
Every mind has weather. The skill is refusing to let the monsoon draft your letters.