Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

by Adam M. Grant

In the search for Fortune’s best networker, when Rifkin popped up as the winner, the reporter on the story, Jessica Shambora, laughed out loud. “Not surprisingly, I had already met him! Someone had referred me to him for a story I was researching on virtual goods and social networks.” Shambora, who now works at Facebook, says that Rifkin is “the consummate networker, and he didn’t get that way by being some sort of climber, or calculated. People go to Adam because they know his heart is in the right place.” When he first moved up to Silicon Valley, Rifkin felt that giving was a natural way to come out of his shell. “As a very shy, sheltered computer guy, the concept of the network was my north star,” he says. “When you have nothing, what’s the first thing you try to do? You try to make a connection and have a relationship that gives you an opportunity to do something for someone else.” On Rifkin’s LinkedIn page, his motto is “I want to improve the world, and I want to smell good while doing it.” As of September 2012, on LinkedIn, 49 people have written recommendations for Rifkin, and no attribute is mentioned more frequently than his giving. A matcher would write recommendations back for the same 49 people, and perhaps sprinkle in a few unsolicited recommendations for key contacts, in the hopes that they’ll reciprocate. But Rifkin gives more than five times as much as he gets: on LinkedIn, he has written detailed recommendations for 265 different people. “Adam is off the c...