Unimpressed by rank

A sovereign man respects the position and sees through the person wearing it. He has learned that an impressive title often sits on a small character, and that the badge is not the man.

This is not disrespect. He gives every office its due. But he does not confuse the office with the soul inside it, and he does not perform a different self for the powerful than he does for the powerless. The rank-obsessed man is easy to spot: he is warm to whoever can help him and cool to whoever cannot, and everyone beneath him notices. The man genuinely indifferent to status treats the intern and the chief executive with the same steady regard — and both remember him, because both felt, maybe rarely, fully seen.