This book teaches me to give productively

Posted by Giang Son | Nov 19, 2023 | 4 min read

My take (pun intended) on Adam Grant's first book titled "Give and Take".


It’s 3pm on a Tuesday. I’m focusing on my own tasks, with a hard deadline the day after. I receive a message. It’s not one from my manager or any of my teammate. It’s by a colleague from another department: she’s asking for help with a data visualization task, and she too has a fixed deadline.

I don’t have any obligation to help, but my gut feeling says I should. But if I do that, I risk having my own work delayed. What am I to do?

I recently found a solution to this dilemma in the book Give and Take, where the author Adam Grant shares some surprising insights into why helping other people is actually beneficial (to the helper), and that there are productive and less productive ways to help.

According to Adam, there are 3 styles when it comes reciprocity in the workplace and in life: takers (being selfish, always put one’s needs in front of others, take all the benefits to oneself), givers (care about others needs, willing to share and help unconditionally), and matchers (only give as much as one can receive).

If you think that being a “giver” would be a disadvantage in a highly competitive world where multiple people fight for the same limited rewards, you would be partly right. When examining the data, Adam notices that the least successful people are givers.

However, that is not whole story. Adam’s data also shows that across multiple professions, the most successful people are givers. What gives? (pun intended). In the first few chapters of the books, Adam provides more plenty of reasons to why this might be the case.

Take networking, for example. My own perception of networking is that it is vital to success, however I would image that to be the winners of the networking game people would have to act selfishly and try to get values as much from others as possible. (I personally refrain from that kind of behavior, and as a result, also from networking). I would learn that my perception is incorrect.

Adam sheds some light on why givers are also the best networkers: Givers are open to connect with anyone they can (while takers and matchers would only befriend someone who can give them something in return). Givers, thanks to their good intentions, are more likely to inspire trust in others, motivating them to give back or pay it forward, whereas people might feel wary of takers because they feel manipulated. (Most people are very good at detecting the reciprocity style of their counterparts).

Personally, I don’t need any persuasion about giving. I’ve been taught from an early age to be caring and kind towards others. My whole culture supports this attitude. The question is: how do to it effectively? How to become the givers who achieve success and not those who fall to the bottom?

That takes us back to the dilemma at the start. In an US study, engineers from a Fortune 500 were facing the same kind of problem that I do: they were on a tight deadline, but are asked for help by their colleagues. Some engineers are generous and giving, but they do so at their own perils: they interrupt their own work to help others and as a result, have their productivity (and morale) reduced. But once he engineers were advised to “chunk” it, i.e: they create windows of time dedicated to focus and other windows to assist coworkers, they were able to help AND their productivity was unaffected (if not improved). That’s exactly the answer I was looking for!

“Chunking” (as Adam calls it) is a kind of “otherish” behavior: valuing the interests of oneself just as much as the interests of others. It is one of the traits that separate successful givers.

There are other tactics of effective givers that I think I should employ for myself. I should also note, that if you are a leader of a team/ an organization, you could also learn from this to get the best out of your giver teammates.

  • When feeling burned out, I should be willing to ask for help when I need it.
  • When negotiating, if I’m afraid to make demands for myself, pretend like I’m fighting for the benefits of someone I care about. (This should come in handy when I negotiate for my salary, for example).
  • When feeling unmotivated, I should look to see where and how my work is making a positive impacts on other people.

My only criticism with Give and Take is that it could have been more concise. Adam repeatedly spends too many paragraphs to elaborate on his anecdotes (often 8-10 each, yes I counted), whereas his point could have easily been made in a few sentences. I glossed over many of his ideas because his thesis statements are often buried under so much unnecessary information.

That being said, the ideas that I did take away (the ones that I mentioned in this post) are quite valuable. I had my doubts about being a giver. Now I can be confident in becoming one.


Thank you for reading. I've also written some other posts that you can check out.