One day, one of my cousins told me interpersonal relationship was really important. I knew that clearly, but he also told me never exhausted other people’s gratitude. He did help a friend build house for a week and the friend offered to send his whole family to town to have spring shopping for he had a nice car. My cousin’s wife thought he was stupid to refuse to be helped and he only smiled. He told me seriously, “I’m not gonna let that kind of trifle to exhaust his gratitude. What’s more, it makes him think I ask for return so earnestly.”

    Some of our products used the solution of R company, but R company was conservative and wasn’t willing to offer us source code. So whatever request customer had, we needed to ask R company for help. There was a small customer who kept asking us to do this and that for him. I was tired of this kind of small potato and simply asked my assistant to handle him. My assistant was honest and kept asking R company for help on every single request of the small potato customer. Unluckily, the customer had so many requests and I asked when would be the end, but he only replied he didn’t know. The engineer of R company was impatient and wanted us to offer all requests to him for once.  The customer failed to do that and even threatened he wouldn’t continue his test until current requests were done. My assistant kept forwarding customer’s requests to the engineer of R company to make him angry and he never judged the customer’s requests.

    So I made a decision and asked the customer to offer all his requests at once, if not, we would not pay attention to him for he had already exhausted R company’s gratitude to us. I wasn’t willing to exhaust R company’s gratitude on such a small potato for the gratitude was gotten at the price of a big order of 800,000 pieces. With this kind of offer, the customer wasn’t as strong as before and accepted it without hesitation and only had two final requests. My assistant was an honest man, but wasn’t strong-minded. Being 100% of docile and obedient wasn’t a way to do business. I told him and hoped him could understand this.