Kindness has a strange way of coming back through doors you forgot you opened.

People keep a quiet ledger of who treated them well, and they pay it out years later without announcing why. The return almost never comes from the person you helped. It arrives sideways, through someone they mentioned you to, in a room you did not know existed. It also means kindness aimed at a payoff rarely works, since the timing is unpredictable.

Be decent to the people who cannot do anything for you right now. Not as a strategy. Just often enough that it is how you operate by default.