Givers and Takers, by Adam Grant

“Everytime we interact with another person at work, we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as much value as we can, or contribute value without worrying about what we receive in return?” (pg. 4).

“Givers and takers differ in their attitudes and actions towards other people. If you’re a taker, you help others strategically, when the benefits to you outweigh the personal costs. If you’re a giver, you might use a different cost-benefit analysis: you help whenever the benefits to others exceed the personal costs . . . if you’re a giver at work, you simply strive to be generous in sharing your time, energy, knowledge, skills, ideas, and connections with other people who can benefit from them” (pg 5).

“There’s something distinctive that happens when givers succeed: it spreads and cascades” (pg 10).

“It takes time for givers to build goodwill and trust, but eventually, they establish reputations and relationships that enhance their success” (pg 15).

“My default is to give. I’m not looking for quid pro quo; I’m looking to make a difference and have an impact, and I focus on the people who can benefit from my help the most” (pg 22).

If you give only so you can succeed, it probably won’t work (pg 26).

“Although takers tend to be dominant and controlling with subordinates, they’re suprisingly submissive and deferential toward superiors. When takers deal with powerful people, they become convincing fakers. Takers want to be admired by influential superiors, so they go out of their way to charm and flatter” . . . they are “obsessed with making a good impression upward, but worried less about how {they} are seen by those who follow {them}” (pg 32).

“Takers often rise by kissing up, but they often fall by kicking down” (pg 32).

“It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others” - John Andrew Holmes (pg 61).

“Highly talented people tend to make others jealous, placing themselves at risk of being disliked, resented, ostracized, and undermined” (pg. 75).

“Responsibility Bias: exaggerating our own contributions relative to others’ inputs” (pg 81).

“To effectively help colleagues, people need to step outside their own frames of reference” (pg 90).

“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” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“When people focus on others, as givers do naturally, they’re less likely to worry about egos and miniscule details; they look at the big picture and prioritize what matters most to others” (pg 114).

“Takers tend to worry that revealing weaknesses will compromise their dominance and authority. Givers are much more comfortable expressing vulnerability: they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid of exposing chinks i their armor. By making themselves vulnerable, givers can actually build prestige” (pg 133).

“If people give too much time, they end up making sacrifices for their collaborators and network ties, at the expense of their own energy . . . givers end up exhausted and unproductive” (pg 155).

Selfless givers are people with high other-interest and low self-interest . . . successful givers are otherish: they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests” (pg 157).

“When people give continually without concern for their own well-being, they’re at risk for poor mental and physical health” (pg 170).

“Those who volunteered between one hundred and eight hundred hours per year were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered fewer than one hundred” (pg 173).

“Trust is one reason givers are so susceptable to the doormat effect: they tend to see the best in everyone, so they operate on the mistaken assumption that everyone is trustworthy . . . in reality, they ‘re wildly inaccurate” (pg 190).

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Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know, by Adam Grant

The “I’m not biased” bias is when “people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking” (pg. 25).

“The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs” (pg 26).

“Recognizing our shortcomings opens the door to doubt . . . if knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom” (pg. 28) and “The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don’t know” (pg 31).

Dunning-Kruger effect: “those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t . . . the less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we seem to overestimate our actual intelligence in that domain . . .the first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club” (pg 40).

“Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,” blogger Tim Urban explains. “While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of” (pg 45).

“If we care about accuracy, we can’t afford to have blind spots. To get an accurate picture of our knowledge and skills, it can help to assess ourselves like scientists looking through a microscope. But one of my newly formed beliefs is that we’re sometimes better off underestimating ourselves” (pg 48).

“If we never worry about letting other people down, we’re more likely to actually do so. When we feel like impostors, we think we have something to prove. Impostors may be the last to jump in, but they may also be the last to bail out” (pg 52).

“We don’t have to wait for our confidence to rise to achieve challenging goals. We can build it through achieving challenging goals” (pg 53).

“Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re imposters. They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re committed to improve their sight. They don’t boast about how much they know, they marvel at how little they understand . . .arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses” (pg 54).

Ideas survive not because they’re true, but because they’re interesting (pg 59).

Givers have higher rates of failure than takers and matchers - but higher rates of success too (pg 61).

“Being wrong is the only way I feel sure I’ve learned anything” (pg 62).

“The best performers are the ones who started their jobs believe their work would have a positive impact on others . . . givers would (therefore) be more successful than takers, because they would be energized by the difference their actions made in others’ lives” (pg 62).

“Even positive changes can lead to negative emotions; evolving your identity can leave you feeling derailed and disconnected” (pg 63).

“If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year” (pg. 63).

“It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart” (pg 68).

“If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable being wrong, we’re not afraid to poke fun at ourselves” (pg 72).

“The apathy of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy” (pg 80).

“Dissatisfaction promotes creativity only when people feel committed and supported - and that cultural misfits are most likely to add value when they have strong bonds with their colleagues” (pg 84).

“Most people immediately start with a straw man, poking holes in the weakest version of the other side’s case. He does the reverse: he considers the strongest version of their case, which is known as the steel man” (pg 108).

“A single line of argument feels like a conversation; multiple lines of argument can become an onslaught” (pg 111).

“It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear” (pg 143).

“Presenting two extremes isn’t the solution; it’s part of the polarization problem. Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories” (pg 165).

“Perspective-taking consistently fails because we’re terrible mind readers. We’re just guessing . . . What works is not perspective-guessing but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their vies” (pg 178).

“It turns out that even if we disagree strong with someone on a social issue, when we discover that she cares deeply about an issue, we trust her more. We might still dislike her, but we see her passion for a principle as a sign of integrity. We reject the belief but grow to respect the person behind it” (pg 179).

“If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life” (pg 193).

“Every year I would aim to throw out 20 percent of my class and replace it with new material. If I was doing new thinking every year, we would all start rethinking together” (pg 195).

“Good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of teaching” (pg 203).

“Education is more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning” (pg 203).

“It takes confident humility to admit that we are a work in progress” (pg 215).

“In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop questioning its vices” (pg 216).

“A bad decision process is based on shallow thinking. A good process is grounded in deep thinking and rethinking, enabling people to form and express independent opinions” (pg 217).

“The more people value happiness, the less happy they often become with their lives” (pg 237).

“When we’re searching for happiness, we get too busy evaluating life to actually experience it . . . we spend too much time striving for peak happiness, overlooking the fact that happiness depends more on the frequency of positive emotions than their intensity . . . when we hunt for happiness, we overemphasize pleasure at the expense of purpose” (pg 238).

People who are happy don’t focus on being happy, they look for contribution and connection (pg 240).

Grade: A

Adam Grant is one of my favorites.

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