A man of many excellences equals many men. By imparting his own enjoyment of life to his circle he enriches their life. Variety in excellences is the delight of life... so let Art create in him a true microcosm by training his taste and intellect.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Held against maxim 27's depth doctrine, this looks like a contradiction and is actually a sequence. Depth first: the one undeniable capability that anchors your value. Then range, deliberately added: the second competence, the cultivated interest, the capacity to hold a conversation outside your lane. The versatile person lives several lives in one span and enriches every circle he joins, because variety is what he brings to the table where specialists sit silent outside their specialty. Range also insures: the market that stops paying for your first excellence rarely stops paying for all of them at once. The microcosm is built, not born, by training taste and intellect across more than one field, one deliberate layer at a time.
Practice
- Anchor first, then annex: with your core excellence established, add one adjacent competence every few years, taken seriously enough to be real.
- Cultivate one excellence that is purely for life, not market: music, history, a craft; it feeds the circle and the self the career cannot.
- Bring your range to the table deliberately; the cross-field observation is often your most valuable contribution in rooms full of single-field depth.
Use this when
- Use this from mid-career on, when the anchor is secure and additional depth in the same spot yields less than first breadth elsewhere.
- Use it for the long retirement; the man of one excellence retires from everything at once, the versatile man never entirely retires (maxim 134's doubling, applied to selfhood).
Ignore this when
- Don't start annexing before the anchor holds; range without a root is the scatter maxim 27 condemned.
- Don't collect shallow badges; an excellence, the quote says, not a hobby list. Fewer, realer.
A picture of it
The colony knew him as four different men, depending who you asked: the structural engineer, the tabla player who taught on Sundays, the man who ran the library drive, the one who explained mutual funds at the society office. His engineering paid; the rest, built patiently over decades, did something else: at his retirement, four separate circles claimed him, and the years after sixty arrived already furnished. His batchmate, a better engineer by a margin, retired from his single excellence into a silence nothing else had been trained to fill.
One deep root, many branches. That is a life built like something that intends to last.