Give and Take: a revolutionary Approach to Success pdfdrive com

The Scrooge Shift
Why a Soccer Team, a Fingerprint, and a Name Can Tilt Us in the
Other Direction
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his
nature which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness
necessary to him, although he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing
it.
—Adam Smith, father of economics
In 1993, a man named Craig Newmark left IBM after seventeen years to take a
computer security position at Charles Schwab in San Francisco. As a single guy
new to the Bay Area, he was looking for ways to spice up his social life. In early
1995, he started e-mailing friends to share information about local arts and
technology events. Word of mouth spread, and people began to expand the
postings beyond events to feature job openings, apartments, and miscellaneous
items for sale. By June, the e-mail list had grown to 240 people. It was too large
for direct e-mail, so Craig moved it to a listserv. In 1996, a website was born,
and it was called
Craigslist
. By the end of 2011, there were Craigslist sites in
more than seven hundred locations around the world. In the United States alone,
roughly fifty million people visit Craigslist each month, making Craigslist one of
the ten most popular websites in the country—and one of the forty most visited
in the world.

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Craigslist flourished by appealing to our basic matcher instincts. It facilitates
transactions in which buyers and sellers can agree on a fair price, exchanging
goods and services for what they’re worth. Fundamentally, Craigslist is about
trading value in direct exchanges between people, creating a matcher’s preferred
even balance of give and take. “We’re not altruistic,” Newmark writes. “From
one perspective, we’re like a flea market.”
Could a system like this function based entirely on giving, instead of
matching?
In 2003, an Ohio native by the name of Deron Beal decided to find out. Just
like Craig Newmark, Beal was in a new city where he lacked information, so he
started an e-mail list of friends. Following the lead from Craigslist, Beal was
aiming to create Internet-based local communities of exchange for anyone to
access, connecting people who wanted goods with people who were ready to