The Door You Hold Open May Lead to Your Next Opportunity
There is an old piece of advice that sounds almost too simple to be considered business strategy: be nice to people. Not performatively nice. Not the polished kind of nice that switches on when a customer walks into the room and switches off the second they leave. I mean the everyday kind of kindness that shows up when nobody seems to be keeping score, holding a door, letting someone merge into traffic, thanking the person who cleans the office, listening without interrupting, and treating the newest employee with the same respect you give the company president. It matters because people remember how you make them feel. They may forget your job title, your sales pitch, or the impressive list of equipment you own, but they rarely forget whether you treated them like they mattered. And here is the part we often miss: we never truly know who another person is, who they know, what they will become, or what role they may eventually play in our life. The pers...
