DEEP READING · READ 84
Give and Take · Adam Grant · 2013
People at work can be sorted by the ratio at which they give and take — givers who put in more than they get out, takers who get out more than they put in, and matchers who trade favour for favour; and on almost every performance ranking you can build, the bottom rung is crowded with givers and so is the top one. What decides which end you land on is not how much you give, but whether you are as shrewd on your own behalf as you are on everyone else's.
Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton — the field that studies how people actually behave inside institutions — and was tenured at twenty-eight, the youngest in the school's history. Before any of that he worked as a professional magician and coached springboard diving, two trades that both turn on getting other people to believe you and to get better. Give and Take (2013) was his first book, and its real achievement is converting something that had lived entirely in the register of moral exhortation ("be helpful") into a measurable question in organizational behaviour: where do different reciprocity styles actually end up, and what do the data say.
Pin the words down first or the whole book gets misread. A taker's default move is "what can I get out of this." Takers are not necessarily villains; they simply believe the world is a zero-sum arena in which you grab or get grabbed. A giver's default move is "what do you need," and they spend time, expertise, contacts and recommendations without pricing the return. A matcher runs on quid pro quo: help you once, book the favour, wait to be repaid; get shortchanged, book that too, and settle up later.
Three qualifiers, all load-bearing. First, these are strategies inside a setting, not personality etched in bone: the same person can be an unreserved giver at home and a strict matcher across a negotiating table. Grant is describing your default gear — where you slide when you have no time to think. Second, the ratio is about how you open: a giver contributes first, without asking whether it will come back. That is the whole distinction; it is not about who is down on the ledger at the end. Third, in most organizations matchers are the largest group, with givers and takers as the minorities on either flank — a demographic fact that turns out to be the engine of the entire book.
This is the book's most counterintuitive finding and the one worth carrying away. Grant assembled data across industries. Among a group of Californian engineers, the least productive were the givers — too busy unblocking colleagues to finish their own work. Among medical students, the lowest grades belonged to those who most strongly endorsed statements about helping others. Among insurance salespeople, givers brought in roughly 40% of what takers and matchers did (Grant's phrasing is that the others earned about two and a half times as much — paraphrased). So far the story reads like a warning against being too nice.
Then look at the other end of the same ranking and it flips: the very best salespeople were also givers, averaging something like 50% more annual revenue than takers and matchers. Same for the strongest medical students and the strongest engineers. And takers and matchers? They almost never come last and almost never come first. They cluster in the middle.
Schematic, not real data; the vertical axis is the density of givers at each position. Givers crowd both the bottom and the top of the ladder; the stretch in between belongs to takers and matchers.
The picture kills two popular slogans at once. "Nice guys finish last" sees only the left peak; "the more you give the more you get" sees only the right one. The question worth asking is not whether to give, but why two people doing the same giving end up drained and dominant respectively. Everything else in the book is an answer to that.
The answer rides on a word Grant coined: otherish. He treats concern for others and concern for self as two independent axes rather than the two ends of a seesaw — the single most important conceptual move in the book. Low on both is apathy. High on self and low on others is the taker. High on both is the otherish giver. And very high on others with self at nearly zero is the selfless giver — the population of the left peak.
Selfless givers come apart in specific ways. They say yes to everything, so their calendar fills with other people's priorities. They will not bargain on their own behalf, because asking feels grasping. They absorb other people's distress wholesale and run dry before anyone else does. Grant describes a consultant (name changed) who mentored juniors, absorbed every unglamorous task, was universally liked — and stalled, because her own deliverable time had been shredded into fragments. Her problem was never that she gave too much. It was that she gave without carrying her own ledger.
The otherish giver looks quite different. Still contributes first, still does not price the return — but chooses the form of the giving (the favours that are cheap for them and valuable to you), concentrates it rather than being interrupted all day, states plainly what they want, and stops when the other party turns out to be a taker. Selfless is not an intensified version of otherish; it is a different road — one that ends in depletion, and that is a bad deal even for the people being helped, since a person who has been drained has less and less left to give.
Why should giving pay off over a long enough horizon? Most people reach for "what goes around comes around," which does not survive contact with psychology. Grant's answer is structural: matchers are the biggest group in any organization, and a matcher's core impulse is fairness — they will spend their own resources to punish takers and repay givers even when they have no stake in the transaction. You help A and A may never repay you. But if any of the B, C and D who watched it happen are matchers, they will show up when you need them. A giver's return does not come back from the person helped; it comes back from the bystanders.
This also explains why a taker's collapse is always both delayed and sudden. Takers are skilled at kissing up and kicking down: the boss sees a capable, presentable colleague; peers and juniors see a different face entirely. That worked for a long time when information did not travel sideways. Today, internal review tools, backchannel reference checks and a quiet word before a hire turn lateral reputation into a searchable file. Transparency is a tailwind for givers and a headwind for takers: the taker's gain is a one-off, while the cost keeps compounding in the network.
This is the book's most useful correction. Agreeableness is one of the Big Five personality traits and describes the outside — warm, courteous, easy to be around. Giving and taking describe motive: whose interests you are working for. The two are independent, and crossing them gives four kinds of people.
| Giver (working for you) | Taker (working for themselves) | |
| Agreeable (pleasant) | Agreeable giver: warm and genuinely helpful — easiest to spot, easiest to exploit | Agreeable taker = the faker: the dangerous square, a smile with your account behind it |
| Disagreeable (prickly) | Disagreeable giver: blunt, critical, and on your side — the most undervalued person in any organization | Disagreeable taker: obvious at a glance, and therefore limited in damage |
"Pleasant to deal with" and "working in whose interest" are separate questions; the two mismatched squares are where misjudgement concentrates.
The most wasted people are the disagreeable givers — the colleague who takes your proposal apart, the mentor who will not let you save face. They supply the scarcest commodity in an organization: feedback uncontaminated by the wish to please you. Because the packaging is unattractive, their advice gets heard as an attack and their promotions come slowly. The most dangerous are the fakers, generous exactly when someone is watching or something is available, and gone the moment you stop being useful. Grant's detection method is not to read manner but to look for asymmetry in behaviour: does this person have two faces for the boss and the receptionist? When they describe a result, is it "I" or "we"? Do the collaborators they cite quietly vanish from the story? (The book also notes a nice proxy measure: Chatterjee and Hambrick used the size of a CEO's own photograph in the annual report as an index of narcissism — the bigger the portrait, the wilder the swings in company performance.)
Why is a giver's network worth more? Start from an old result in sociology: Granovetter's 1973 strength of weak ties — most people who found jobs through contacts did not find them through close friends but through acquaintances. The logic is plain: close friends swim in your information pool, so whatever they know you already know. Acquaintances are wired into worlds you cannot reach, and new information can only come from there. The catch is that weak ties are awkward to approach and easy to be brushed off by.
Grant's patch is dormant ties — people you once knew well and lost touch with. Levin, Walter and Murnighan had executives reconnect with ten long-lost contacts each and put a real question to them. The result is striking: advice from the dormant contacts was rated more novel and more useful than advice from current colleagues. Dormant ties get both halves: the trust survives, so nothing has to be rebuilt, while the two worlds have been drifting apart for years, so the information does not overlap. And knocking on that door costs a giver almost nothing psychologically — what they handed out years ago is the visa on today's "it's been a while." When a taker knocks on the same door, the first thing the person remembers is the last time they were used.
So how do you give at a price you can afford? The book's best piece of tradecraft is the five-minute favour, from Adam Rifkin in Silicon Valley, named by Fortune the best networker in America — not on the strength of dinners, but of years of doing small things that cost him five minutes and measurably changed someone's situation: forwarding an email, making an introduction, writing a recommendation, giving three lines of honest feedback. Its real function is to demote giving from a personality to an affordable habit. Five minutes is a price you can always pay, the favours accumulate into an enormous line of credit across the network, and because each one is cheap, none of them pushes you toward the left peak.
Givers often speak without force: they cushion with "I might be wrong about this" and "what if we tried," they turn statements into questions, they admit what they do not know. Conventional success literature treats this as a defect to be trained out. Grant names it powerless communication and shows it is a misjudged advantage — on the condition that the audience has to be persuaded rather than commanded.
It comes in four forms. First, admitting weakness outright: Grant writes about a trial lawyer with a stutter who puts it on the table for the jury before he starts, and wins their trust by doing so. Underneath is the pratfall effect from social psychology — Aronson found that a person who has already demonstrated competence becomes more likeable after a public blunder, while the same blunder costs an unremarkable performer. Vulnerability amplifies competence; it does not substitute for it. Second, speaking tentatively: turning an assertion into a hypothesis builds the other person a staircase, so agreeing does not require them to concede they were wrong. Third, asking questions, which lets people arrive at the conclusion themselves — and nobody argues with a conclusion they reached out loud. Fourth, seeking advice, Grant's favourite move, which does three things at once: you get the information, the other person is placed in a position of respect, and the mere fact of having thought on your behalf makes them more inclined to be on your side (the Franklin effect: ask someone for a small favour and they end up liking you more).
The first compounding advantage a giver has in a team comes from the Pygmalion effect. In Rosenthal and Jacobson's 1968 experiment, researchers picked students at random and told teachers these particular children had tested as about to bloom; a year on, those children really had gained more. What changed was not the children. It was the teachers: they gave those students more time, harder problems, more specific feedback and more patience — and the expectation made itself true. Takers and matchers concentrate their investment on proven stars. A giver's default assumption is that anyone could be the one about to bloom, so the good treatment goes to far more people — and more of those bets come in. (The critiques section below is honest about how much smaller this effect is than the popular version.)
The second compounding advantage comes from sharing credit, and it treats a bias almost everyone carries: responsibility bias. Ross and Sicoly asked married couples to estimate their own share of the housework, and the two answers routinely added up to well over 100%. Nobody is lying. You remember every job you did and you did not see most of the ones they did. Givers counter it by counting other people's contributions first, which makes them look generous and also puts them closer to the truth. Grant sets two men side by side: George Meyer of The Simpsons, whom the writers' room credited with improving everyone's scripts and who never fought for a byline, so that the whole room wanted to work for him; and Jonas Salk, who on the day the polio vaccine was announced named none of the team who built it, never repaired the relationship with his own lab, and was never elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Credit is one of the few things in this world that multiplies when divided.
This is Grant's signature work as a researcher and the best-evidenced stretch of the book: reconnect the severed line between a job and the person it benefits, and motivation returns on its own — no extra money, no pep talk.
Three experiments read best side by side. One: a University of Michigan phone-solicitation centre, where the work is tedious and getting hung up on is routine. The researchers arranged for one group and one group only to spend five minutes with a student attending on the scholarships they were raising. A month later that group's weekly talk time was up roughly 142% and the money raised up roughly 171% — while their rated opinion of the job had not shifted at all. What changed was that they had seen the other end of the line. Two: in an Israeli study, radiologists reading CT scans with the patient's photograph attached wrote longer, more detailed reports and flagged more incidental findings; with the photographs removed, the great majority of those findings went unreported. Three: Grant and Hofmann hung two signs at hospital sinks — "Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases" and "Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases." The patient-focused sign raised soap and gel consumption by around 45%.
The implication cuts both ways for givers. They stand closer to the beneficiary by temperament, so they catch fire more readily; and any manager can reconnect that line deliberately — put the engineer in a room with a user, let the back office meet the person who waited two hours less because of them. Meaning is not something you announce; it is something you let people see landing on someone.
Givers slide down to the left peak by falling into three holes: too soft (they will not ask on their own behalf), too available (they say yes to everything), and too empathic (they absorb other people's feelings and burn out first). Grant's antidotes are concrete.
One, advocate for someone else. Research finds repeatedly that people bargain timidly for themselves and boldly — and better — for others. What a giver needs is not to become tougher but to swap in a different principal: treat this salary conversation as something you are winning for your family, your team, or the person who comes after you and inherits the precedent. The ground you cannot hold for yourself, you will hold for somebody else.
Two, generous tit for tat. The ancestor is the strategy that won Axelrod's repeated prisoner's dilemma tournaments: cooperate first, then do whatever the other side just did to you. Its flaw is that a single accidental defection locks both sides into endless retaliation. Grant's amendment is to fold in some forgiveness — as a rough rule, retaliate on two of every three defections and let the third go, leaving a door open to restart. It keeps you from being a cash machine for takers without letting one misunderstanding destroy a relationship that could have been mutual. Its companion is sincerity screening: give everyone one favour by default, watch how they respond, and let that decide whether there is a second — which caps your exposure at one small favour rather than requiring you to read people correctly in advance.
Three, chunk your giving rather than sprinkling it. Lyubomirsky found that performing five acts of kindness on a single day lifted well-being more than spreading the same five across a week: scattered favours are too small to register even with yourself, while a batch is big enough to reach the conclusion "I am someone who helps." The related rule of thumb is the often-quoted hundred-hour figure: the well-being returns to volunteering are best around a hundred hours a year, roughly two a week, past which it starts eating your own life. In practice: put helping into fixed blocks instead of letting it interrupt the whole day at random.
Four, learn to ask. This is the hardest lesson for givers, who are fluent at giving and embarrassed to request, and so never draw on the enormous credit balance sitting in their network. Matchers, meanwhile, need an occasion to settle up before the relationship can continue. By never asking, you deny people the chance to repay you — and freeze a relationship that could have run both ways into a one-way street.
Strip out the case studies and the argument is five steps in a straight line:
1. There are three default gears at work: givers who put in more than they take, takers who take more than they put in, and matchers who trade favour for favour — strategies inside a setting, not personality etched in bone.
2. The bottom of the performance ranking is givers, and so is the top; takers and matchers are almost always in between. So the question was never whether to give, but why the same giving drains one person and compounds for another.
3. The dividing line: concern for others and concern for self are two independent axes, not a seesaw. Both turned up is otherish; only the first is selfless — and selfless is what the left peak is made of.
4. A giver's return rarely comes from the person they helped; it comes from the matchers watching, who will spend their own resources to punish takers and repay givers. Takers win round one, givers win round ten.
5. Agreeableness is surface, giving is motive. The most undervalued person in an organization is the disagreeable giver, who is hard to like and genuinely wants you to be better; the most dangerous is the agreeable taker — and you identify them not by manner but by asymmetry: two faces for the boss and the junior, "we" or "I" when the result gets described.
6. The most valuable contacts are not close friends but dormant ties — people you once knew well, who still carry the trust while their information has long since diverged from yours; and only someone with a history of giving can knock on that door at no cost.
7. Demote giving to a habit you can afford: the five-minute favour — one introduction, one forwarded email, three lines of honest feedback. Cheap enough never to push you toward the left peak, and it accumulates into an enormous line of credit.
8. Hedging, asking, speaking tentatively and seeking advice carry more weight whenever the audience must be persuaded rather than commanded — but vulnerability amplifies competence rather than replacing it; the pratfall effect only works for people who have already proven they can do the job.
9. You did not see most of what other people did (responsibility bias), so counting their contributions first is both generous and more accurate. Credit is one of the few things that multiplies when divided — Meyer gave up the byline and got the whole room; Salk named nobody, and never got it back.
10. Givers fall behind by being too soft, too available and too empathic, and there are four antidotes: negotiate on someone else's behalf (you will hold ground for others that you will not hold for yourself), generous tit for tat, chunked giving in fixed blocks, and learning to ask — because by never asking you deny other people the chance to repay you.