I love paradoxes, koans, fables, and teaching stories of all kinds. Often, a joke can be a very effective teaching story.

Here’s a joke that’s also a teaching story—or actually, it’s not really a joke, it’s just a surprising and true statement.

It’s a line often attributed to legendary economist John Maynard Keynes or to investor J. Paul Getty, and typically it goes something like this:

“If you owe your bank ten thousand dollars, you have a problem. But if you owe the bank ten million dollars, the bank has a problem.”

The general concept behind this maxim is that small debts give power to the lender, who can use legal action against the borrower. However, extremely large debts put the lender at risk because the borrower’s potential failure could cause significant financial harm to the lender.

This kind of flip happens in everyday life, too. For instance, if you make a small but critical mistake in a work report, you’ll be held at fault and perhaps lose your job. But if instead you’re responsible for a catastrophic company-wide system failure, now management has a big problem on its hands, and your job may be more secure than ever, because the company needs to understand exactly what went wrong.

Or say you’re working with a contractor on a big kitchen renovation. If you disagree about a small charge, early on, you could refuse to pay or replace the contractor easily. But if the contractor has torn out your kitchen, charged you deposits for a bunch of materials, and begun the work, now power shifts to the contractor, because it would be so costly in money, time, and energy for you to try to replace that contractor with someone new.

It’s an observation that’s worth keeping mind, whether you’re the borrower or the lender. Small debts burden the borrower; big debts burden the lender.