There is a simple but merciless test of character: how do you treat people who cannot help you? The junior colleague whose opinion does not affect your career. The cleaner in a corridor. The driver. The person serving you food. The person at the bottom of the social or professional hierarchy who has no power over your outcomes and whose judgment of you will never reach anyone who matters to your advancement. How you treat those people is who you are. Most people treat high-status people well. That requires almost nothing: it is incentivised, it is expected, it carries social reward. Treating low-status people well, or people with no status at all, with the same quality of attention and care and basic dignity requires something more. It requires that your respect for people is grounded in something other than what they can do for you. This is not a call to perform generosity for its own sake. It is a straightforward observation about what is happening when you treat people differently based on their utility to you. You are operating from a transactional model of human beings. And that model tends to bleed into all relationships eventually, including the ones with people who do matter to your advancement, because it is what you are practising every day in the interactions that seem not to count.