A discreet Proteus, learned with the learned, saintly with the sainted. It is the great art to gain every one's suffrages... Notice men's moods and adapt yourself to each, genial or serious as the case may be.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The honest translation matters, because this maxim is often read as a licence for fakery. It is not. Your values stay fixed; your register moves. The doctor who explains a diagnosis one way to a professor and another way to a farmer is not being two-faced; she is doing her job twice as well. What changes is vocabulary, pace, examples, and formality. What never changes is the content of the message and the person delivering it. People who refuse to adapt call it authenticity, but the room hears something else: this person makes me do all the work of understanding him.
Practice
- Before any important conversation, ask one question: what does this listener already know, and what do they care about?
- Build two or three registers deliberately: the technical one, the plain one, the brief one for seniors in a hurry.
- Watch the listener's face, not your script; confusion appearing is your cue to switch registers, not to repeat louder.
Use this when
- Use this across every boundary you work on: specialists and laymen, head office and field, elders and teenagers.
- Use it in writing too; the same update should exist in a one-line version and a one-page version.
Ignore this when
- Don't let the register change touch the substance; saying different things to different people is the fakery this maxim gets wrongly blamed for.
- Don't adapt so completely that you vanish; the Proteus is discreet, but he is still recognisably himself in every shape.
A picture of it
A cardiologist gives the same diagnosis twice in one hour. To the retired physics teacher: percentages, the trial data, the mechanism. To the farmer who came alone by bus: the heart is a pump, this pipe is narrowing, here is what we do, and here is what you must stop doing. Both patients leave understanding their own case fully. Her junior, watching, had been taught the biggest lesson of the ward: the second explanation was not a simpler doctor. It was a better one.
One message, many doors. The speaker who owns only one key blames every lock but his own.