The old homily, “nice guys finish last”, gives ‘nice’ an unnecessarily bad connotation. Nice has many nuances.

• pleasing; agreeable; delightful: a nice visit.
• amiably pleasant; kind: They are always nice to strangers.
• characterized by, showing, or requiring great accuracy, precision, skill, tact, care, or delicacy: nice workmanship; a nice shot; a nice handling of a crisis.
• showing or indicating very small differences; minutely accurate, as instruments: a job that requires nice measurements.
• minute, fine, or subtle: a nice distinction.
• having or showing delicate, accurate perception: a nice sense of color.
• refined in manners, language, etc.: Nice people wouldn’t do such things.
• virtuous; respectable; decorous: a nice girl.

Those are 8 of 14 definitions given for ‘nice’, none of which denote the derogatory connotations of the word as used in the sentence above. But if you find that during the course of all your peer networking activities that you are “carrying the water” for lot’s of folks and consider yourself all the more meritorious for having done so, perhaps business is not your natural calling.

Those who do finish last are those who didn’t prepare to finish first. Nice is not subservience,timidity, self-deprecation. Yet thinking so little of oneself that you always position yourself to be needed or to serve is an apprenticeship for martyrdom and that is not “nice”. It’s a type of false humility and as such, fails to inspire trust and certainly will not net you the business referrals your in the game to acquire.

Kate Lorenz, CareerBuilder.com, has some advice for “nice” guys. See if in recognizing the behavior she describes, you can take heed of the advice, because in the end, the only guys who finish last are called losers.