Give and Take: a revolutionary Approach to Success pdfdrive com

The Art of Motivation Maintenance
Why Some Givers Burn Out but Others Are On Fire
The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than the unintelligent altruists, will be
fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.
—Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics
Up to this point, we’ve been focusing on how givers climb to the top of the
success ladder through the unique ways that they build networks, collaborate,
communicate, influence, and help others achieve their potential. But as you saw
in the opening chapter, givers are also more likely to end up at the bottom of the
success ladder. Success involves more than just capitalizing on the strengths of
giving; it also requires avoiding the pitfalls. If people give too much time, they
end up making sacrifices for their collaborators and network ties, at the expense
of their own energy. If people give away too much credit and engage in too
much powerless communication, it’s all too easy for them to become pushovers
and doormats, failing to advance their own interests. The consequence: givers
end up exhausted and unproductive.
Since the strategies that catapult givers to the top are distinct from those that
sink givers to the bottom, it’s critical to understand what differentiates successful
givers from failed givers. The next three chapters examine why some givers burn
out while others are on fire; how givers avoid being exploited by takers; and
what individuals, groups, and organizations can do to protect givers and spread

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their success.
Recently, the Canadian psychologists Jeremy Frimer and Larry Walker led an
ambitious effort to figure out
what motivates highly successful givers
. The
participants were winners of the Caring Canadian Award, the country’s highest
honor for giving, recognizing people who have devoted many years of their lives
to help their communities or advance a humanitarian cause. Many winners of
this award have sustained extraordinary giving efforts for decades in order to
make a difference.
To reveal what drove them, all of the participants filled out a questionnaire
asking them to list ten goals in response to “I typically try to . . .” Then, Walker
conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-five Caring Canadian winners and a
comparison group of twenty-five people who matched the winners in gender,
age, ethnicity, and education, but had not sustained the same level or duration of
giving. Walker spent a hundred hours interviewing all fifty people about their
lives, covering key periods and critical events in childhood, adolescence, and
adulthood. From there, independent raters read the goal lists, listened to the
interview tapes, and rated the degree to which the participants expressed two key
motivations: self-interest and other-interest. Self-interest involved pursuing
power and achievement, whereas other-interest focused on being generous and
helpful. On which set of motivations did the Caring Canadian winners score
higher than the comparison group?
The intuitive answer is other-interest, and it’s correct. In their life stories, the
Caring Canadians mentioned giving and helping more than three times as often
as the comparison group. When they listed their goals, the Caring Canadians
listed nearly twice as many goals related to other-interest as the comparison
group. The Caring Canadians highlighted goals like “serve as a positive role
model to young people” and “advocate for women from a low-income bracket.”
The comparison participants were more likely to mention goals like “get my golf
handicap to a single digit,” “be attractive to others,” and “hunt the biggest deer
and catch big fish.”
But here’s the surprise: the Caring Canadians also scored higher on self-
interest. In their life stories, these highly successful givers mentioned a quest for
power and achievement almost twice as often as the comparison group. In their
goals, the Caring Canadians had roughly 20 percent more objectives related to
gaining influence, earning recognition, and attaining individual excellence. The
successful givers weren’t just more other-oriented than their peers; they were
also more self-interested. Successful givers, it turns out, are just as ambitious as

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takers and matchers.
These results have fascinating implications for our understanding of why
some givers succeed but others fail. Up until this point, we’ve looked at
reciprocity styles on a continuum from taking to giving: is your primary concern
for your own interests or others’ interests? Now I want to complicate that
understanding by looking at the interplay of self-interest and other-interest.
Takers score high in self-interest and low in other-interest: they aim to maximize
their own success without much concern for other people. By contrast, givers
always score high on other-interest, but they vary in self-interest. There are two
types of givers, and they have dramatically different success rates.