Top Quotes: “Give and Take” — Adam Grant
Background: Grant cites a number of studies that prove that those who give to others in the workplace without expecting anything in return are are more successful at work than tit for tat or taker folks. He dives into the reasons why this is, how to foster good giver habits in yourself and others, and how to avoid giver burnout. I found it very inspiring!
Are Givers Successful?
“Pronoia — the opposite of paranoia — is the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being, or saying nice things about you behind your back. If you’re a giver, this belief may be a reality, not a delusion.”
“When we need new info, 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.”
“Rifkin’s giving is governed by a simple rule: ‘You should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody.”
“In a study of engineers, givers only took a productivity dive when they gave infrequently. Of all engineers, the most productive were those who gave often — and gave more than they received. These were the true givers, and they had the highest productivity and the highest status: they were revered by their peers. By giving often, engineers built up more trust and attracted more valuable help from across their work groups — not just from the people they helped.”
“In a study, University of Minnesota researchers found that highly talented people tend to make others jealous, placing themselves at risk of being disliked, resented, ostracized, and undermined. But if these talented people are also givers, they no longer have a target on their backs. Instead, givers are appreciated for their contributions to the group. By taking on tasks your colleagues don’t want, you can dazzle them with your wit and humor without eliciting envy.”
“Research shows that givers get extra credit when they offer ideas that challenge the status quo. In studies I conducted, when takers presented suggestions for improvement, colleagues were skeptical of their intentions, writing them off as self-serving. But when ideas that might be threatening were proposed by givers, their colleagues listened and rewarded them for speaking up, knowing they were motivated by a genuine desire to contribute.”
Giver Habits
“The Simpsons has contributed many words to the English lexicon, the most famous being Homer’s d’oh! response to an event that causes mental or physical anguish, yoink, the familiar phrase that Simpsons characters utter when they snatch an item from another character’s hands, and meh, the expression of pure indifference that debuted in the sixth season.”
“As a giver, his focus was on achieving a high-quality collective result, not on claiming personal responsibility for that result. ‘I tended not to be able to remember the stuff that I had done, so I wasn’t always saying when I did this or that. I was saying when we did this and that. I think it’s good to get in the habit of that.’”
“The key to balancing our responsibility judgments is to focus our attention on what others have contributed. All you need to do is make a list of what your partner contributes before you estimate your own contribution. Bring together a work group of 3–6 people and ask each member to estimate the % of the total work they do. Add up their estimates, and the average total is over 140%. Ask them to reflect on each member’s contributions before their own, and the average total drops to 123%.”
“Givers don’t wait for signs of potential. Because they tend to be trusting and optimistic about other people’s intentions, in their roles as leaders and mentors, givers are inclined to see the potential in everyone. By default, givers start by viewing people as bloomers. They see potential where others don’t, which sets in motion a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.”
“Extensive research shows that once people make an investment of time, energy, or resources, when it goes sour, they’re at risk for increasing their investment. When an investment doesn’t pay off, if the expected value is negative, we invest more.”
“Givers are comfortable expressing vulnerability; they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid of showing chinks in their armor. By making themselves vulnerable, givers can actually build prestige. But there’s a twist: expressing vulnerability is only effective if the audience receives other signals establishing the speaker’s competence. When the average candidate was clumsy in a study, audiences liked him even less. But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him more. Psychologists call this the pratfull effect. A blunder can help an expert appear human and approachable — instead of superior and distant.”
Questions
“The psychologist James Pennebaker coined a term the joy of talking. Years ago, he divided strangers into small groups and gave them 15 minutes to talk to strangers about a topic of your choice. After the 15 minutes were up, they rated how much they liked the group. It turns out the more someone talked, the more they liked the group and the more they talked, the more they thought they’d learned about the group. By dominating the conversation, you believe you’ve actually come to know the people around you, even though they barely spoke. It is givers, by virtue of their interest in getting to know us, who ask us the questions that enable us to experience the joy of learning from ourselves. And by giving us the floor, givers are actually learning about us and from us, which helps them figure out how to sell us things we already value.”
“Asking questions is a form of powerless communication that givers adopt naturally. Questions work especially well when the audience is already skeptical of your influence, such as when you lack credibility or status, or when you’re in a highly competitive negotiation situation. In a study, expert negotiators spent much more time trying to understand the other side’s perspective; questions made up over 21% of the experts’ comments but less than 10% of the average negotiators’ comments.”
“When we hear a powerful persuasive message, we get suspicious. In some cases, we’re concerned about being tricked. In other situations, we just want to make our own free choices, rather than having our decisions controlled by someone else. So if I tell you to go out and vote, you might resist. But when I ask if you’re planning to vote, you don’t feel like I’m trying to influence you. It’s an innocent query, and instead of resisting my influence, you reflect on it. You’ve been convinced by someone you already like and trust: yourself.”
Powerless Speech
“When people have to work closely together, powerless speech (hesitations like “well” “um” yeah” “kinda” “probably” “I think,” disclaimers like “This may be a bad idea, but,” Tag questions, “That’s interesting, isn’t it?” “That’s a good idea, right?” and Intensifiers, “really” “very” “quite”) is actually more influential than powerful speech. Powerless speech signals that you’re a giver. By talking tentatively, you show a willingness to deter to the other person, or at least take their opinion into consideration, and earn greater respect and influence.”
Advice Seeking
“If you want someone to become your advocate, ask them ‘If you were in my shoes, what would you do?’ Advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority. In one experiment, a researcher had people negotiate the sale of a property. When the sellers focused on their goal of getting the highest possible price, only 8% reached a successful agreement. When the seller asked the buyer for advice on how to meet their goals, 42% reached one. Asking for advice encouraged greater cooperation and information sharing, turning a potentially contentious negotiation into a win-win deal.”
“In a study, executives who got board seats were more likely to seek advice along with a compliment. When praising a director’s skill, the advice-seeking execs asked how she mastered it. When extolling a director’s success in a task, the execs asked for recommendations about how to replicate his success. When execs asked for advice in this manner, the director was significantly more likely to recommend them for a board appointment.”
“Advice seeking has four benefits: learning (gaining new info), perspective taking (encouraging others to take our perspectives), commitment (since the person has invested time in you now), and flattery (showing them we respect and admire their insights).”
“Half a century ago, psychologists paid people for succeeding on a geometry task. In the control group, the participants kept the money. But when another group started to leave, the researcher said, ‘I was wondering if you could do me a favor. The funds for this experiment have run out and I’m using my own money to finish. As a favor to me, would you mind returning the money you won?’ Nearly all gave the money back. When questioned about how much they liked the researcher, the people who had done him the favor liked him substantially more than the people who didn’t. Why? When we give our time, energy, knowledge, or resources to help others, we strive to maintain a belief that they’re worthy and deserving of our help.”
“Benjamin Franklin said, ‘He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.’”
Burnout
“Most people assume that self-interest and other-interest are opposite ends of one continuum. Yet I’ve consistently found that self-interest and other-interest are completely independent motivations; you can have both of them at the same time.”
“Selfless giving, in the absence of self-preservation instincts, easily becomes overwhelming. Being other-ish means being willing to give more than you receive, but still keeping your own interests in sight, using them as a guide for choosing when, where, how, and to what you give. Otherish givers help with no strings attached; they’re just careful not to overextend themselves along the way.”
“Giver burnout has less to do with the amount of giving and more with the amount of feedback about the impact of that giving. Givers don’t burn out when they devote too much time and energy to giving. They burn out when they’re working with people in need but are unable to help effectively.”
“100 seems to be a magic number when it comes to giving. In a study of more than 2,000 Australians in their mid-60s, those who volunteered 100–800 hours per year were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered fewer than 100 or more than 800 hours annually.”
“In another study, there were no benefits of volunteering more than 100 hours, which seems to be the range where giving is maximally energizing and minimally draining. A hundred hours a year breaks down to just two hours a week. Research shows that if people start volunteering two hours a week, their happiness, satisfaction, and self-esteem go up a year later, the sweet spot where people make a meaningful difference without being overwhelmed or sacrificing other priorities.”
“In a Canadian study, for the first few hours of volunteering a week, volunteers gained knowledge and skills at a consistent rate. By five hours a week, volunteering had diminishing returns: people were learning less and less with each additional hour.”
“In a study, happiness increased when people performed five giving acts all in a single day, rather than doing them one per day. Researchers speculate that ‘spreading them over the course of a week might have diminished their salience and power or made them less distinguishable from participants’ habitual kind behavior. By chunking your giving into weekly blocks, you can experience your impact more vividly, leading efforts to feel like more than a drop in a bucket.”
“In a study, when firefighters experienced signs of burnout, they were more likely to go out of their way to help colleagues with heavy workloads, share new knowledge with supervisors, give advice to newer colleagues, and even listen to colleagues’ problems. Why would burnout increase their giving? UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor has discovered a stress response that differs from fight or flight. She calls it tend and befriend. ‘One of the most striking aspects of the human stress response is the tendency to come together in groups to provide and receive joint protection in the threatening times.’”
“In a study, participants with unusually high trauma scored high on a questionnaire measuring ‘other-directedness.’ These other-directed people operated like givers. By constantly overriding their selfish impulses in order to help others, they had strengthened their psychological muscles, to the point where using willpower for painful tasks was no longer exhausting. Other studies have shown that givers accrue an advantage in controlling their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Over time, giving may build willpower like weightlifting builds muscles. Of course, we all know that when muscles are overwhelmed, they fatigue and sometimes even tear — this is what happens to selfless givers.”
“To judge givers, we often rely on personality cues, but it turns out these cues can be misleading. In half a century of research, psychologists have discovered a fundamental personality trait that distinguishes how people tend to appear in their social interactions. It’s called agreeableness — agreeable people tend to appear cooperative and polite — they seek harmony with others, coming across as warm, nice, and welcoming. Disagreeable people tend to be more competitive, critical, and tough — they’re more comfortable with conflict, coming across as skeptical and challenging.”
“We tend to stereotype agreeable people as givers, and disagreeable people as takers. When a new contact appears affable, it’s natural to conclude that he has good intentions. If he comes across as cold, this seems like a sign that he doesn’t care what’s in our best interests. But in making these judgments, we’re paying too much attention to the shell of a person’s demeanor, overlooking the pearl inside the shell. Giving and taking are based on our motives and values, and they’re choices that we make regardless of whether our personalities are agreeable or disagreeable. Whether you’re nice or not is separate from whether you’re self-focused or other-focused. When you combine outer appearances and inner intentions, agreeable givers and disagreeable takers are only two of the four combinations that exist in the world. We often overlook that there are people who are rough in demeanor, but ultimately generous with their time, expertise, and connections.”
“Jason Geller, a Deloitte executive offers help to every new hire. He can’t proactively go and spend time with every junior person is his firm so he tries to sense who’s genuine and who’s not through an initial conversation. Some folks approach the conversation in terms of learning. Others say, ‘I want to get promoted. What should I do?’ and focus on telling him what they’re doing, not really asking insightful questions.”
“The most effective negotiators are otherish; they report high concern for their own interests and high concern for their counterparts’ interests. By looking for opportunities to benefit others and themselves, otherish givers are able to think in more complex ways and identify win-win solutions that both takers and selfless givers miss. Instead of just giving away value like selfless givers, otherish givers create value first. By the time they give slices of pie away, the entire pie is big enough that there’s plenty left to claim for themselves: they can give more and take more.”
Fostering Giving in Others
“In 1993, Craig Newmark moved to SF for a job. As a single guy new to the Bay Area, he was looking for ways to spice up his social life. In early 1995, he start emailing friends to share info about local art and tech events. Word of mouth spread, and people began to expand the postings beyond events to feature job openings, apartments, and miscellaneous items for sale. By June, the email list had gown to 240 people. It was too large for direct email, so Craig moved it to a listserv. In 1996, a website was born, and it was called Craigslist. By the end of 2011, there were Craigslist sites in more than 700 locations around the world and it’s one of the top ten most popular sites in the U.S. and top 40 in the world.”
“Because we associate our names so strongly with our identities, we might be attracted to major decisions that remind us of our names. In an effort to demonstrate this, researchers conducted a mind-boggling set of studies and found that people are unusually likely to end up living in places that resemble their first names. People named Jack are four times more likely than people named Phillip to live in Jacksonville. And it’s not that they’re named after these places, people are more likely to move to places that resemble their own names (Georgia is twice as likely to move to Georgia as chance would predict).”
“It works for careers too: in 1990, Dennis was the 40th most common male name in the U.S., Jerry was the 39th, and Walter was 41st. There were 270 dentists in the U.S. named Jerry, 257 named Walter. How many were named Dennis? 482! If your name was Dennis, you were almost twice as likely to become a dentist.”
“In a study, 82% of participants who were told they shared a rare trait with another participant were willing to help them vs. only 55% when they were told they shared a common trait. It was an uncommon commonality that drove people to act like givers. We gravitate toward people, places, and products with which we share an uncommon commonality. To explain why, researcher Marilynn Brewer developed an influential theory. On the one hand, we want to fit in: we strive for connection, community, belonging, and affiliation with others. On the other hand, we want to stand out: we search for uniqueness and individuality. As we navigate the social world, these two motives are often in conflict. The more strongly we associate with a group, the greater our risk of losing our uniqueness. The more we work to distinguish ourselves from others, the greater our risk of losing our sense of belongingness. How do we resolve this conflict? The solution is to be the same and different at the same time. A popular way to achieve this is to join a unique group. Being part of a group with shared interests, identities, values, skills, or experiences gives us a sense of connection and belonging. At the same time, being part of a group that is clearly distinct from other groups gives us a sense of uniqueness. The more unique a group, value, interest, skill, or experience is, the more likely it is to facilitate a bond. These are the groups in which we take the most pride, and feel the most cohesive and valued.”
“People donate more money to charity when the phrase ‘even a penny will help’ is added to a request. Interestingly, this phrase increases the number of people who give without necessarily decreasing the amount that they give. Legitimizing small contributions draws in takers, making it difficult and embarrassing for them to say no, without dramatically reducing the amount donated by givers.”
“When people join a group, they look for cues about appropriate behavior. The visibility of giving can affect reciprocity styles significantly. In many domains of life, people end up taking because they don’t have access to info about what others are doing. A team of psychologists surveyed more than 800 Californians about their energy consumption. They asked the Californians how important the following factors were in shaping their decisions to save energy — it saves money, it protects the environment, it benefits society, a lot of other people are doing it. The Californians consistently reported that the most important factor was protecting the environment and following the lead of other people was last. The team wanted to see if people were right about their own motivations, so they visited nearly 400 homes in San Marcos and randomly assigned them to receive door hangers around each of the four topics. When asked how motivating the door hangers were, the residents whose hangers emphasized joining their neighbors reported the lowest motivation. But when the team looked at the residents’ energy bills, they found that the residents were wrong about what motivated them. The residents whose door hangers emphasized joining their neighbors actually conserved the most energy. Subsequent door hangers that provided feedback on whether residents were consuming less or more than their neighbors motivated electricity takers to significantly reduce their consumption — but the effect grew stronger the closer and more similar the group was to the residents.”
“People often take because they don’t realize that they’re deviating from the norm. In these situations, showing them the norm is often enough to motivate them to give.”
“In a Reciprocity Ring experiment in my classroom, I announced that each student would make a request to the class and the rest of the class would try to use their knowledge, resources, and connections to help fulfill the request. The request could be anything meaningful in their professional or personal lives, from job leads to travel tips. Assuming other MBA students to be takers, students watched in disbelief as their peers began to use their networks to help one another.”
“People underestimate the givers in their midst. Why? When we try to predict others’ reactions, we focus on the costs of saying yes, overlooking the costs of saying no. It’s uncomfortable, guilt-provoking, and embarrassing to turn down a small request for help. Plus, workplaces and schools are often designed to be zero-sum environments with forced rankings and required grading curves that pit group members against one another in win-lose contests. In these settings, it’s only natural to assume that peers will lean in the taker direction, so people hold back on giving. This reduces the actual amount of giving that occurs, leading people to underestimate the number of people who are interested in giving.”
“Over time, because giving appears to be uncommon, people with giver values begin to feel they’re in the minority. As a result, even when they do engage in giving behaviors, people worry that they’ll isolate themselves socially if they violate the norm, so they disguise their giving behind purely self-interested motives. A Princeton sociologist interviewed a wide range of Americans who chose helping professions, from cardiologists to rescue workers. When he asked them to explain why they did good deeds, they referenced self-interested reasons, such as ‘I liked the people I was working with’ or ‘It gets me out of the house.’ They didn’t want to admit that they were genuinely helpful, kind, generous, caring, or compassionate. We have social norms against sounding too charitable.”
“The first step to foster giving is to make it ok and normal to ask for help. Research shows that the vast majority of giving at work occurs between people in response to direct requests.”
“Privately signing a pledge to be kind like Harvard students do might backfire. In one experiment, psychologists randomly assigned people to write about themselves using either giver terms like caring, generous, and kind, or neutral terms like book, keys, and house. After the participants filled out another questionnaire, a researcher asked them if they wanted to donate money to a charity of their choosing. Those who wrote about themselves as givers donated an average of 2.5 times less money. ‘I’m a giving person,’ they told themselves, ‘so I don’t have to donate this time.’ When Harvard students sign the pledge, they establish credentials as givers, which may grant them a psychological license to give less — or take more.”
“Influence is far more powerful if you change people’s behaviors first, and their attitudes often follow. To turn takers into givers, it’s often necessary to convince them to start giving. Over time, if the conditions are right, they’ll come to see themselves as givers.”
“Givers characterize success as individual achievements that have a positive impact on others. They see success in terms of making significant, lasting contributions to a broad range of people. Taking this definition of success seriously might require dramatic changes in that organizations hire, evaluate, reward, and promote people. It would mean paying attention not only to the productivity of individual people but also to the ripple effect of this productivity on others. If we broadened our image of success to include contributions to others, people might be motivated to tilt their professional reciprocity styles toward giving.”
“A powerful way to give is to help others work on tasks that are more interesting, meaningful, or developmental than their average tasks. One VP individually asked employees about their personal interests and asked them what they’d enjoy doing that might also be of interest to other people. He then sent them out into the company to pursue their mission with three rules: 1) it has to appeal to at least one other person 2) be low or no cost and 3) be initiated by you. Months later, about ⅔ of the employees had made some effort toward making their visions a reality, and roughly half of those employees succeeded in launching them.”
“Job crafting involves innovating around a job description, creatively adding and customizing tasks and responsibilities to match personal interests and values. A Google study found that this made employees both happier and more productive. You can start by creating a ‘before sketch’ of how you currently allocate your time and energy, and then develop a visual ‘after diagram’ of how you’d like to modify your job. Job crafting booklets can be ordered at www.jobcrafting.org.)”
“Embrace the five-minute favor! Adam Rifkin’s favorite offers are to give honest feedback and to make an intro.”
“Reconnect with dormant ties. Once a month, reach out to one person with whom you haven’t spoken in years. Find out what they’re working on and ask if there are ways you can be helpful.”
“An inspiring community of givers is ServiceSpace, a platform for people to increase their giver quotients through gift economy projects, inspirational content, and nonprofit support. ‘The more you give, the more you want to do it — as do others around you. It’s like going to the gym,’ the founder says, ‘If you’ve been working out your kindness muscles, you get stronger at it.”
“Another impressive initiative is HopeMob, a place where ‘generous strangers unite to bring immediate hope to people with pressing needs all over the world.’”
“If you’d rather give on your own, try the GOOD thirty-day-challenge, Sasha Dichter’s thirty-day generosity experiment, or Ryan Garcia’s year of daily random acts of kindness.”
“Visit www.giveandtake.com to take a free survey that tests your giver quotient. You can invite other people in your network to rate your reciprocity style, and you’ll receive data on how often you’re seen as a giver, taker, and matcher.”
