City of Paris

During a visit to Beijing, I picked up a book entitled Why Southerners Succeed in Business. Being a southerner myself (I come from the province of Fujian, directly across the strait from Taiwan), I was intrigued. It turned out to be a great book, filled with everyday tips and great lessons about life. Following is one of my favorite stories. For context, note that the north-south divide in China is somewhere around Shanghai. In this story, Shanghai represents the south and Beijing represents the north.

Two peasants from the countryside decided to venture into the big cities to make a better living. One was heading to Shanghai; the other had a ticket to Beijing. In the waiting room at the train station, the two peasants overheard a conversation.

“The Shanghai people look for every opportunity to make money. Sometimes you even get charged a fee for asking a passerby for directions,” one man lamented.

“Well, Beijing people are very generous. If they see that you have no money, they will offer you food; sometimes they’ll even give you their old clothes,” said the other.

The peasant heading toward Shanghai thought to himself, “I think I’d be better off going to Beijing. That way, even if I don’t make any money, I won’t starve.”

The other peasant, who had planned to go to Beijing, reflected on the conversation and came to the opposite conclusion: “If people in Shanghai can make money just giving directions to strangers asking the way, think how many other ways there must be to make a living!”

At the ticket exchange booth, the two peasants met, exchanged tickets and got on the trains. The fellow who went to Beijing found everything exactly as he had imagined. During his first month in the city, he enjoyed himself, did nothing, but never went hungry. By just picking up loose change here and there, he even managed to send small amounts of money home.

The other peasant arrived in Shanghai and, sure enough, began making a living right away. He started by standing at the train station waiting to give people directions. He also learned to park himself in front of public toilets to collect a fee, and he earned extra money bringing people water to wash their faces. Eventually, he came up with a business idea. Noting how people in Shanghai loved indoor plants, he went to the countryside, collected ten bags of dirt, and brought it into the city to sell as “potting soil.” To his astonishment, the ten bags sold right away. That same day, he made six trips to net a fifty-dollar profit. Before too long, he opened a store. Soon he had an entire franchise of stores, employing hundreds of people, from Shanghai to Nanjing to Hangzhou, even north to Beijing.

Three years later, the peasant-turned-businessman was on a routine tour of his stores. As his train pulled into Beijing, a man came up to him and asked for his empty beer bottle. As the two men made eye contact, they immediately recognized each other and remembered the day they swapped train tickets back in their hometown in the countryside.

Do you have favorite stories about good businesspeople you’d like to share? Please post a comment.

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