Give and Take Quotes

“As Samuel Johnson purportedly wrote, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“Success doesn’t measure a human being, effort does.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“The art of advocacy is to lead you to my conclusion on your terms.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“You never know where somebody’s going to end up. It’s not just about building your reputation; it really is about being there for other people.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
― Grant Ph.D., Adam M., Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“Regardless of their reciprocity styles, people love to be asked for advice.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“So if givers are most likely to land at the bottom of the success ladder, who’s at the top—takers or matchers? Neither. When I took another look at the data, I discovered a surprising pattern: It’s the givers again.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity.”
― Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity. If we want to succeed, we need a combination of hard work, talent, and luck.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“research shows that givers get extra credit when they offer ideas that challenge the status quo.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“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”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“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”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“Americans see independence as a symbol of strength, viewing interdependence as a sign of weakness”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“givers always score high on other-interest, but they vary in self-interest. There are two types of givers, and they have dramatically different success rates. Selfless givers are people with high other-interest and low self-interest. They give their time and energy without regard for their own needs, and they pay a price for it. Selfless giving is a form of pathological altruism, which is defined by researcher Barbara Oakley as “an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs,” such that in the process of trying to help others, givers end up harming themselves.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: From the author of million-copy bestseller THINK AGAIN

“Teachers’ beliefs created self-fulfilling prophecies. When teachers believed their students were bloomers, they set high expectations for their success. As a result, the teachers engaged in more supportive behaviors that boosted the students’ confidence and enhanced their learning and development”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: From the author of million-copy bestseller THINK AGAIN

“psychological safety—the belief that you can take a risk without being penalized or punished.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority. In”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“a perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“Indeed, Cialdini finds that people donate more money to charity when the phrase “even a penny will help” is added to a request.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“Research suggests that 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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: From the author of million-copy bestseller THINK AGAIN

“When takers win, there’s usually someone else who loses. Research shows that people tend to envy successful takers and look for ways to knock them down a notch. In contrast, when givers like David Hornik win, people are rooting for them and supporting them, rather than gunning for them. Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of people around them.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“In the mind of a Giver, the definition of success itself takes on a distinctive meaning: Whereas Takers view success as attaining results that are superior to others, and Matchers see success in terms of balancing individual accomplishments with fairness to others, Givers are inclined to follow (Peter Audet)’s lead, characterizing success as individual achievements that have a positive impact on others.”
― Adam Grant, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

“It’s not what a player is, but what he can become… that will allow him to grow.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: From the author of million-copy bestseller THINK AGAIN

“Research shows that takers harbor doubts about others’ intentions, so they monitor vigilantly for information that others might harm them, treating others with suspicion and distrust. These low expectations trigger a vicious cycle, constraining the development and motivation of others. Even when takers are impressed by another person’s capabilities or motivation, they’re more likely to see this person as a threat, which means they’re less willing to support and develop him or her.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: From the author of million-copy bestseller THINK AGAIN

“the higher the psychological safety in a unit, the fewer errors they made. Why? In the units that lacked psychological safety, health care professionals hid their errors, fearing retribution. As a result, they weren’t able to learn from their mistakes. In the units with high psychological safety, on the other hand, reporting errors made it possible to prevent them moving forward.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: From the author of million-copy bestseller THINK AGAIN

“Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren’t, but they’re still aware of it—still regard it as a debt. But others don’t even do that. They’re like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return . . . after helping others . . . They just go on to something else . . . We should be like that. —Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor A”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“above all, I want to demonstrate that success doesn’t have to come at someone else’s expense.” In”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“When the average candidate was clumsy, audiences liked him even less. But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him even more.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“But there’s something distinctive that happens when givers succeed: it spreads and cascades.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success