Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.
Give & Take by Adam Grant. A Book Summary/Review.
This is a fabulous book, perhaps one of my most highlighted. The book is passionately written, well researched, full of deep insights and actionables.
The book is filled with anecdotes, research citations and stories that drill down the message like a hot knife on butter. Adam Grant, a best selling author and an organizational psychologist at Wharton works his words like charm!
The book declares that there are 3 kind of humans (with a focus on workplace) — Givers, Takers, and Matchers. And goes on to say how takers, who are just interested in taking and matchers, who are into paying it back and giving only so much as they receive (or can receive) eventually fall short on the success ladder to givers, who are genuinely interested in giving without keeping score.
The book gives plenty of heads up and wisdom to givers to help them maximize the impact of giving and avoid getting burnt out, taken advantage of and fall short of personal goals. The book in its is a call to give more. It encourages givers and matchers to tilt in the direction of giving. It encourages leaders to inculcate a giving nature/culture in their personal lives, companies and homes.
In short I’d recommend you read and re-read this book once in a while. The strategies help you avoid being a doormat or a push over while continuing to give and keep on giving. I am a big fan of Adam Grant’s clarity of thinking, and this book will clearly help you see the same.
My key takeaways.
The five minute rule
You should be willing to do any favour for anybody which only takes you five minutes to do. This lesson is derived from Adam Rifkin, Fortunes once world’s most networked man.
Expand the pie
Concentrate your efforts on expanding the pie, versus getting the biggest bite of it. A small cut from a big pie, is bigger than a big cut from a small pie. And everyone prospers.
Compassion is contagious
When you give, others are driven to give too. When a person in a group gives at a personal cost, the value of giving is tripled by the giving done by witnessing coworkers. The presence of a single giver is enough to establish a norm of giving.
To avoid burnout, give more frequently
Giving doesn’t affect productivity if done properly. In fact a study with engineers found that people who give frequently and give more than they get, are most productive and enjoys the best status among peers.
“I’ll sum up the key to success in one word: generosity” — Keith Ferrazzi
Givers gain
Givers thrive in a collaborative environment, taking the example of George Meyer, the mastermind behind many of simpson humor, as a classic example of a giver, the Adam goes on to explain why givers gain the most in collaborative setup. They share credit, but so much more. They console coworkers whose work does not par, they create a psychologically safe environment.
Girls help create givers
I stumbled upon this article in the New York Times from a citation in the book on page 105. The article explains how having female family members (specifically siblings), even infants, drives you in the giving direction.
Givers are gracious
They treat people with graciousness, while takers — with suspicion and doubt. They hold relatively lower expectation of the potential of their peers and subordinates. Even when a taker is impressed by a person, they will tend to see them as a threat. This acts a vicious cycle, dwindling drive and motivation.
“When we treat man as he is we make him worse than he is.
When we treat him as if he already was what he potentially could be
We make him what he should be.”― Goethe
Givers are wired to succeed
This is super interesting, in the chapter titled the power of powerless communication Adam goes on to show how certain things givers intuitively and naturally does such as asking more questions, giving more space to talk and even being vulnerable, creates a connection that makes sales, wins cases and earns the respect of people.
As a giver, you might be comforted to know that you can stop pretending to be super aggressive and always trying to fake dominance, and be your natural self. It yields better results according to numerous studies cited.
Give in larger chunks
Research shows that the best way to increase happiness and fulfilment is to give in larger chunks of time. For instance spend a day in a week volunteering rather than an hour every day.
Givers ask for help
One of my favorite teactics in this book is to seek advice. Seeking advice, authentically, with a desire to learn, gets things done. It achieves for 4 benefits.
- learning
- perspective taking — as in it forces the other person to get in our shoes and take our perspective. Creating solutions that previously never showed up.
- Commitment: When people give you advice, they convince themselves to believe you are worthy of advice and time, nudging them to commit on the advice and help you achieve it.
- Flattery — when you genuinely ask someone for advice (Note here that faking it can backfire nastly) has a hidden flattery aspect achieved.
According to Biographer Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin saw seeking advice as a form of flattery. Franklin “had a fundamental rule for winning friends,” Isaacson writes: appeal to “their pride and vanity by constantly seeking their opinion and advice, and they will admire you for your judgment and wisdom”
Giving advice makes takers feel important and matchers view it as an opportunity to rack up credits they can cash in for favours later. This makes sure people are more likely to respond positively. By asking for help, you are infact increasing the number of givers around.
Adam Grant, infact, in a TED talk claims that 75–90% of all giving in organizations begins with a request for help. And one single giver can improve the overall giving in the team dramatically, according to a research done at a hospital among nurses by Adam and colleagues. At the same time, he tells how critical it is to weed off the takers as they leech the fire off givers.
Important thing to note here is that your advice seeking should be genuine, if you’re faking it people can easily figure out the poop in the hood. A notable characteristic of genuine advice seeking that Adam notes is that it’s spontaneous. Sincere Advice seeking is spontaneous and it creates trust. If not spontaneous, it doesn’t work.
Givers make great negotiators
This one took me by surprise to be honest, but research shows that givers succeed better in negotiating in the longer term. This mostly has got to do with reputation. Once the news is out that you’re a ruthless negotiator people would have their guards up the moment you walk into a room. While aggressiveness and ruthlessness will definitely earn you quick bites in the short term, it will cost eventually cost you big time.
A certain study with MBA students of varying intellectual levels found that the smartest negotiators got better deals for others, not themselves. This is a strategy that pays off dividends in all aspects of personal and professional life in the long run.
This book is an attempt to make giving cool again, encouraging givers to present themselves in their natural self and motivate companies to reward giving and collective accomplishment. When we change the definition of success from ‘getting the biggest bite off a pie’ to ‘expanding the pie for everybody’, everyone prospers.
While I believe all non-fiction writers to be givers, as in the comparatively shorter monetary gains it presents the author with, I loved the giving mentality behind the theme of the book itself — to nudge people to focus their attention and energy on making a difference in the lives of others. And showing how that might cause success to follow as a byproduct.
In short, my verdict is to BUY IT. READ IT. RE-READ IT.
Adam Grant writes in conclusion —
By shifting ever so slightly in the giver direction, we might find our waking hours marked by greater success, richer meaning and more lasting impact.
