Excellent. Givers really do come out ahead. ( )

Give and Take is a compelling research based book that explains how people have become successful in their careers and business goals by being the right type of person when interacting with others. Grant categorizes people into three types: givers, takers, and matchers. In a world where success is dependent on how we interact, he finds that givers are more likely to become successful than takers and matchers. Surprisingly the data backs it up. I really liked the interesting stories of successful people who have lived a givers lifestyle that showed how a giving culture pays off. Grant also explains how people can vary between the three types depending on certain aspects of work especially since givers can be taken advantage of. There is something inspiring about reading other people’s stories of them giving and then them being reciprocated with success in some way or another. It motivates you to also want to give and be mindful of how you interact with others. This is a must read for anyone looking to further their career and achieve success by learning the value of giving a bit more. ( )

3.5 stars

So Adam Grant divides the world into givers, takers and matchers. You would think the givers would be at bottom of things getting run over by the takers in this dog eat dog world, and you would be half right. Adam shows how givers are at the bottom AND the top of the world.

These kinds of books I try to list out the most memorable lesson I received from reading this book. I love learning about pronoia, which is the opposite of the more famous paranoia. What could we accomplish if we believe the whole world is FOR you?

The second major thing that I remember is the abababab. It's just a little blurb that probably none of the other reviewers remember. There was an experiment where people were paid to do mundane tasks (like type out ababababab). It was boring, mind-numbing, and hand-numbing. But as soon as the subject was able to write something else, he was able to do it easily. There's some lesson here about avoiding burnout by doing a change up?

In fact, the motivation part about avoiding burnout probably hit me most because let's face it...there's not a lot of chance of meeting someone with my exact name or writing a comedy.

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The premise of the book is good but loses narrative energy in part.
The examples from the sporting field are hard to relate to for a reader outside of North America, and some business word examples are also very specific to the US.

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Don't ignore this book, because even though it seems like it follows a lot of business/management book clichés, it's actually insightful and seems like it could be very useful in your career or personal life. It's structured like every other "improve your business performance in ten easy steps!!!" clone, but stick with it.

Danger signs:
- An extremely broad subject ("giver" personalities" vs "matchers" or "takers", who aren't as generous to other people or are downright parasitical)
- Cutesy chapter titles (goofy animal analogies like "The Peacock and the Panda", pseudo-paradoxes like "The Power of Powerless Communication", or bad puns like "Chump Change", which is about not being a doormat)
- Seemingly superficial rapid-fire transitions between evidence for the author's position (for example, chapter 3, which is about the power of collaboration, jumps from comedy to architecture to coronary bypass surgery to equity analysts to the polio vaccine to temperature perception experiments to spinal taps to wedding registries)
- Inclusion of possibly irrelevant historical analogies (is the trajectory of Abraham Lincoln's political career really a useful analogy for modern workplace interactions?)

And yet, Grant makes it all work. The book is one long paean to how important it is to be helpful to other people, and how even though it's easy to get trapped in thinking of life as an endless series of zero-sum games where someone else's gain is your loss, you should keep on trying to invest in your fellow coworkers/clients/human beings. Because even though sometimes you'll get burned by enabling people who consume more emotional/financial/temporal resources than they give you, in the long run you'll probably be a happier and more successful person as long as you can successfully balance your own needs with the well-being of the larger groups you're embedded within. Grant has lots of good case studies showing that while being helpful can sometimes backfire on you, such as if you're pathologically ignoring your own needs , helping people generates such positive mutual returns that, much like the evolutionary strategy of Generous Tit-for-Tat, as long as you look on the bright side of human nature you'll be surprised at how far you can go.

It's completely fair to be skeptical of such Pollyanna-ish positivity, yet I feel like Grant is correct to advocate for trusting in other people. While I would love to have seen some more longitudinal evidence (i.e., if givers come to dominate a company, are they vulnerable to an eventual influx of takers in the same way that an ecosystem is vulnerable to an influx of predators?), my experience in my personal and professional career has convinced me that successful groups are the ones that have built up interpersonal trust through exactly the mechanisms that he discusses here. E.O. Wilson, who is quoted here, once had a good line that "Within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals." Yet that actually understates the importance of altruism, because though givers can be exploited, the most successful people in groups tend to be the ones that have built up strong relationships through their assistance and advice. Context is everything when it comes to talking about human behavior, but even though it seems facile to link Teach For America and venture capital firms, Grant is very persuasive when he talks about the inspirational effects of helping people.

No business book would be complete without action items. Here are his end-of-the-book bullet points:
- Test your giver quotient by visiting his website to figure out if you're a giver, matcher, or taker
- Run a reciprocity ring that encourages helpful interactions
- Help other people craft their jobs
- Start a love machine (meaning try to institutionalize helpful feedback mechanisms in your organizations)
- Embrace the five-minute favor, because they cost you very little time but can be very helpful to the recipients
- Practice powerless communication, and take advantage of the psychological loophole that makes people more likely to listen to you when they think you're not trying to lawyer them into something
- Join a community of givers, and get inspired by them
- Launch a personal generosity experiment
- Seek help more often, because people enjoy doing favors for others more than they enjoy having favors done for them ( )