About eight years ago, I lent 190k yuan to a friend, with an agreement to repay within three years at an interest rate of 4.75%.

That was most of the savings my wife and I had worked hard to accumulate over the years!
I was the one who introduced her to the business, so at the time, I was pretty sure she could pay me back.
But then 2020 came, and the pandemic hit...
It was truly devastating. I secretly calculated that my friend and her husband had lost nearly 10 million yuan.
I was absolutely desperate at that point, because I knew my 1 million yuan was as good as gone.
That couple could barely afford to eat, and they had four kids to support—how could they find the money to pay me back? So, I decided to make one last use of that 1 million yuan. Since the money was gone, at least I could leave a good reputation...
I did something I considered pretty despicable: at a dinner party, I publicly returned the IOU to them. I said, "I know you can't pay it back, so I'm letting it go. Just take care of yourselves and don't let anything bad happen."
(Actually, when I said that, my heart was bleeding!)
I pretended to hide it but didn't really, and secretly slipped two stacks of cash to her: "As a friend, this is all I can do." If the story ended there, it wouldn't be anything special.
But then my great motherland and the great party came through in a big way!
By the second half of 2020, domestic industrial production had resumed first, and foreign orders came flooding in!
Another friend of mine in foreign trade was desperately searching for suppliers, and even came to me for help.
I had a sudden inspiration and connected the two sides. They hit it off immediately, like soulmates! Their machines ran nonstop; there was no such thing as inventory—whatever they produced, they sold!
The volume was huge, and the unit price was high! Even defective goods found buyers! That couple made back all their losses in about a year of 2021, and then some! Then they invited me to a very grand dinner.
They returned the principal of 1.02 million yuan, plus 190k yuan in interest for four years, which they rounded up to 200k yuan. They insisted on giving me an 800k yuan bonus, saying if I didn't take it, I would be looking down on them.
So basically, they doubled the repayment. My friend in foreign trade also gave me a 500k yuan referral fee. In the end, I netted a profit of 1.5 million yuan! How was I supposed to explain that?
Even holding that money felt hot in my hands. As for the later confession where I admitted my despicable original thoughts to the couple, I won't go into that here. Anyway, they didn't care—they said back then, creditors would block their door and curse their ancestors for eighteen generations, so what I did was nothing.
In short, life is long. Problems that can't be solved in a month or two become trivial when viewed over a year, two years, three years, or four years.
By that measure, the margin for error in life is actually quite high.