A Taiwanese builder named Lin Zheng-jia was known in his younger years as intelligent, capable, and shrewd in business. He worked hard, understood his industry, and believed he could negotiate to his advantage.
Yet after years of struggle, his business failed, and he went bankrupt.
During that difficult period, Lin repeatedly asked himself what had gone wrong. He did not believe he lacked intelligence, diligence, or business sense. Other people with similar abilities had succeeded, so why had his own efforts ended in failure?
One day, while wandering through the streets with no particular destination, he stopped at a newsstand and bought a newspaper. As he flipped through it, one passage caught his attention.
According to the account, what he read changed how he approached business.
With only a few hundred U.S. dollars in starting capital, Lin decided to try again. His second attempt unfolded very differently. He went from operating grocery stores to running a cement factory and eventually returned to contracting and real estate development.
Within several years, the story says, his assets had grown dramatically.
When reporters later asked him the secret of his comeback, Lin gave a simple answer:
“Take only 60 percent.”
Leaving something for the other person
Years later, Lin was invited to speak at a university. Students wanted to know how he had rebuilt his fortune after bankruptcy and asked what principle had made the difference.
He told them that he had learned to deliberately take a smaller share.
To explain, Lin returned to the newspaper article he had read during the lowest point of his career. It reportedly contained an interview with Hong Kong businessman Richard Li, the son of billionaire Li Ka-shing.
In the interview, Richard Li was asked what secret his father had taught him about making money.
According to the story, he replied that his father had never taught him a special technique for earning money. Instead, he taught him principles for dealing with people.
One of those principles concerned how to divide profits when doing business with others.
If taking 70 percent would be reasonable and taking 80 percent would still be possible, Li Ka-shing advised taking only 60%.
The point was not that every business deal should literally be divided according to those percentages. It was that a person should resist the temptation to extract every possible advantage from a partner.
Lin said he read the passage repeatedly until he understood what he believed he had been missing.
His earlier idea of being “shrewd” had meant calculating every advantage and trying to earn as much as possible from each transaction. After his bankruptcy, he came to see business differently. Genuine business wisdom, he concluded, also required generosity and fairness toward the people with whom one worked.
More profit or more opportunities?
Lin illustrated the idea with a simple calculation.
Suppose a businessman could take 80 percent of the benefit from a deal but voluntarily took only 60 percent instead. His partners would receive more than they had expected.
That might mean less profit from the individual transaction. But people who knew they would be treated fairly would be more willing to work with him again. They might also introduce him to others.
In Lin’s telling, a businessman who insisted on taking 80 percent might eventually be left with only a handful of opportunities, while someone willing to take 60 percent could attract a hundred.
Trying to maximize the profit from every transaction can sometimes reduce the number of people willing to do business with you. Accepting somewhat less can create trust, strengthen relationships, and open the door to far more opportunities.
Looking back on his earlier failure, Lin said his greatest mistake was overcalculation. He had always tried to find a way to earn a little more from the other person, believing that greater immediate profit meant greater success.
Instead, he concluded, “I gained the present but lost the future.”
A reminder he carried with him
At the end of his university talk, according to the story, Lin took an old, yellowed newspaper from his bag. It was the same newspaper that had contained the interview that affected him years earlier.
He had kept it with him as a reminder.
In the margin, he had written a sentence summarizing the principle he had adopted:
“Seventy percent is reasonable. Eighty percent is possible. But I will take only sixty percent.”
For Lin, the lesson was not simply about surrendering profit. It was about recognizing that business relationships have value beyond a single transaction.
Someone who always tries to take the largest possible share may win today but make others reluctant to return tomorrow. Someone who leaves room for partners to benefit can make himself the person others want to work with again.
That change in thinking, Lin said, became the starting point of his comeback after bankruptcy.
The story presents his experience as a lesson in a form of business wisdom that can easily be overlooked: sometimes taking less from one opportunity is what allows many more opportunities to follow.
Translated by Cecilia
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