A small thing—changed my view of “new-rich tycoons”

If you want to succeed, maybe you can learn from it

In the past, I always thought that those big bosses with low education were just new-rich tycoons—good luck, that’s all. Later, I experienced a small thing firsthand, and it changed my mind.

At the time, a friend of mine was doing loan appraisal in the main city. One day, someone was applying for a loan, and he told me to help take photos for him (loan appraisal requires photos). I got the other person’s phone number and contacted him. I told him where I’d be waiting. Turns out, the person who came to pick me up wasn’t a salesman or a general manager from his company—it was the boss himself, driving to pick me up.

The first thing he asked when I got in was whether I’d eaten. Then he asked where I wanted to eat, and he gave me a big pack of Chinese cigarettes—before I even had the chance to settle in. I politely declined the meal, because I knew my “weight.” I wasn’t even an appraiser—I was just there to help take photos.

Then the boss drove me himself, taking me to his stores and warehouses one by one for photos. Throughout the trip, he kept testing my tone. He said he wanted to take a loan of about 1.5 hundred million, to build XX, and asked me whether the appraisal price could be done to that level. At the time his wording also hinted that if it could be arranged, I’d probably get a bonus.

So I told the truth: I said I was only responsible for taking photos, and I couldn’t make decisions about the rest. (Also, my friend had warned me in advance—if it couldn’t be approved, don’t just accept any red packets. Food is fine, but red packets are the bottom line. If you take money even though you can’t get it done, it will cause major problems.)

I made it clear that I was just there as a photo-taking person. For him, that identity had basically no value.

But after I finished photographing in all the relevant places, he still asked where my home was, then drove me there himself. When we got to the ground floor of my building, I told him I was already here. Still, he insisted on driving into the residential compound along the narrow roads that looped around the building—midway, he even managed to get stuck in traffic for a moment, even though it was a matter of just walking a few steps to solve it. He wouldn’t stop until he drove me to the elevator entrance.

(A boss worth over a hundred million personally sends you.)

When I got out, he also took two big bags and three large boxes of food from his trunk, and he even personally carried them with me to the entrance of my elevator.

In that moment, I suddenly understood: someone who could do this level of politeness to a person (me, at the time) who had absolutely no use to him, and with whom he had had no prior connection—if the person were someone who could help him, or someone with an even higher rank than him, what kind of lengths would he go to? I didn’t even dare to imagine.

From then on, I realized this: as long as someone is more successful than you, and after succeeding they can still hold on to that success, no matter whether you look down on them or not—there must be something they do better than most people, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to succeed.