Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

by Adam M. Grant

According to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity.

success depends heavily on how we approach our interactions with other people.

Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them.

Matchers operate on the principle of fairness: when they help others, they protect themselves by seeking reciprocity.

you might predict that givers achieve the worst results—and you’d be right.

These givers reverse the popular plan of succeeding first and giving back later, raising the possibility that those who give first are often best positioned for success later.

what separates the champs from the chumps. The answer is less about raw talent or aptitude, and more about the strategies givers use and the choices they make.

Taking is using other people solely for one’s own gain. Receiving is accepting help from others while maintaining a willingness to pay it back and forward.

But there’s something distinctive that happens when givers succeed: it spreads and cascades. When takers win, there’s usually someone else who loses.

“Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s valuable in a marathon.”

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. —Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner

networks come with three major advantages: private information, diverse skills, and power.

In this chapter, I want to examine how givers, takers, and matchers develop fundamentally distinct networks, and why their interactions within these networks have different characters and consequences.

while givers and takers may have equally large networks, givers are able to produce far more lasting value through their networks, and in ways that might not seem obvious.

Takers want to be admired by influential superiors, so they go out of their way to charm and flatter.

This is another sign that Lay was a taker: he was obsessed with making a good impression upward, but worried less about how he was seen by those below him.

Evidence shows that the vast majority of people in this position reject proposals that are imbalanced to the tune of 80 percent or more for the divider.*

when people get burned by takers, they punish them by sharing reputational information.

“If we create networks with the sole intention of getting something, we won’t succeed. We can’t pursue the benefits of networks; the benefits ensue from investments in meaningful activities and relationships.”

“When you meet people,” says former Apple evangelist and Silicon Valley legend Guy Kawasaki, regardless of who they are, “you should be asking yourself, ‘How can I help the other person?’”

pronoia. According to the distinguished psychologist Brian Little, pronoia is “the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being, or saying nice things about you behind your back.”

project. Surprisingly, the executives rated the advice from the dormant ties as contributing more value than the advice from the current ties. Why? The dormant ties provided more novel information than the current contacts.

When we need new information, we may run out of weak ties quickly, but we have a large pool of dormant ties that prove to be helpful. And the older we get, the more dormant ties we have, and the more valuable they become.

Matchers have a much easier time reconnecting, but they’re often uncomfortable reaching out for help because of their fidelity to the norm of reciprocity.

Instead of trading value, Rifkin aims to add value.

By creating a norm of adding value, Rifkin transforms giving from a zero-sum loss to a win-win gain.

the givers only took a productivity dive when they gave infrequently.

the gap between our natural tendencies to attribute creative success to individuals and the collaborative reality that underpins much truly great work.

This is a defining feature of how givers collaborate: they take on the tasks that are in the group’s best interest, not necessarily their own personal interests.

When givers put a group’s interests ahead of their own, they signal that their primary goal is to benefit the group. As a result, givers earn the respect of their collaborators.

Since many people think like matchers, when they work in groups, it’s very common for them to keep track of each member’s credits and debits. Once a group member earns idiosyncrasy credits through giving, matchers grant that member a license to deviate from a group’s norms or expectations.

The thing about credit is that it’s not zero-sum. There’s room for everybody, and you’ll shine if other people are shining.”

If you’re a taker, your driving motivation is to make sure you get more than you give, which means you’re carefully counting every contribution that you make. It’s all too easy to believe that you’ve done the lion’s share of the work, overlooking what your colleagues contribute.

Why didn’t Meyer have a better memory of his contributions? As a giver, his focus was on achieving a collective result that entertained others, not on claiming personal responsibility for that result.

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be. —attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, physicist, biologist, and artist

This is exactly what has enabled C. J. Skender to develop so many star students. He isn’t unusual in recognizing talented people; he simply starts by seeing everyone as talented and tries to bring out the best in them.

Success doesn’t measure a human being, effort does.

It turns out that motivation is the reason that people develop talent in the first place.

classroom, looking for motivation and work ethic, not only intellectual ability, is part of what has made C. J. Skender so successful in recognizing talent.

This is why givers focus on gritty people: it’s where givers have the greatest return on their investment, the most meaningful and lasting impact.

the major quality of these teachers was that they made the initial learning very pleasant and rewarding.

once people make an initial investment of time, energy, or resources, when it goes sour, they’re at risk for increasing their investment.

Sunk costs do have a small effect—decision makers are biased in favor of their previous investments—but three other factors are more powerful. One is anticipated regret: will I be sorry that I didn’t give this another chance? The second is project completion: if I keep investing, I can finish the project. But the single most powerful factor is ego threat: if I don’t keep investing, I’ll look and feel like a fool. In response to ego threat, people invest more, hoping to turn the project into a success so they can prove to others—and themselves—that they were right all along.

When people make decisions in a self-focused state, they’re more likely to be biased by ego threat and often agonize over trying to find a choice that’s ideal in all possible dimensions.

When people focus on others, as givers do naturally, they’re less likely to worry about egos and miniscule details; they look at the big picture and prioritize what matters most to others.

givers were undervalued by many teams, since they didn’t hog the spotlight or use the flashiest of moves. His philosophy was that “It’s not what a player is, but what he can become… that will allow him to grow.”

Inman’s experience, coupled with research evidence, reveals that givers don’t excel only at recognizing and developing talent; they’re also surprisingly good at moving on when their bets don’t work out.

there are two fundamental paths to influence: dominance and prestige. When we establish dominance, we gain influence because others see us as strong, powerful, and authoritative. When we earn prestige, we become influential because others respect and admire us.

Takers tend to worry that revealing weaknesses will compromise their dominance and authority. Givers are much more comfortable expressing vulnerability: they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid of exposing chinks in their armor. By making themselves vulnerable, givers can actually build prestige.

It turns out that the more you talked, the more you like the group. This isn’t surprising, since people love to talk about themselves. But let me ask you another question: How much did you learn about the group?