The little girl had been standing outside my headquarters in the pouring rain for nearly two hours before I realized she was waiting for me. I did not know her name, and until that moment, I did not even know I had lost my wallet.

I was Arthur Vance, sixty-one years old, owner of four commercial high-rises in Austin and employer of hundreds of people. That afternoon, I had just finished negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal, yet the thing that stopped me in the lobby was one of my managers casually pointing toward the glass doors.“Security should move that kid along. She’s been standing out there forever.”

The girl looked about eight years old, wearing an oversized green raincoat and soaked sneakers while clutching a plastic grocery bag to her chest. Our security chief told me he had invited her inside several times, but she refused to surrender whatever she was carrying.

“She says it belongs to you personally.”

I reached into my jacket.

My wallet was gone.

I immediately stepped outside, and the girl pulled a worn brown leather wallet from the plastic bag. Before handing it over, she opened it and carefully compared my face with the photograph on my driver’s license.A year earlier, an eight-year-old girl had stood in a storm for nearly two hours because she believed that when something important is lost, you return it to the person it belongs to.

The wallet was never the real lesson. The real lesson was that some things cannot be returned by another person.

Sometimes, you have to go back and earn them yourself.