The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle.
No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader, he was fond of saying.
It’s not what a player is, but what he can become… that will allow him to grow.
In 1927, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik demonstrated that people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is inter...
If you’re a matcher, you’ll also punish takers for acting unfairly toward other people.
If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us.
Based on David Hornik’s story, you might predict that givers achieve the worst results—and you’d be right. Research demonstrates that givers sink to the bottom of the success ladder. Across a wide ran...
Although many successful givers start from the default of trusting others’ intentions, they’re also careful to scan their environments to screen for potential takers, always ready to shift from feelin...
A giver might admit the mistake and move on,
When givers like David Hornik win, people are rooting for them and supporting them, rather than gunning for them. Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of people...
Seeking advice is among the most effective ways to influence peers, superiors, and subordinates.
Powerless communication, marked by questions, is the defining quality of how givers sell.
Escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. Over the past four decades, extensive research led by Staw shows that once people make an initial investment of time, energy, or resources, when...
A perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us.
When the average candidate was clumsy, audiences liked him even less. But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him even more. Psychologists call this the pratfall effect.
When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist.
To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to demonstrate some resourcefulness and download a different browser. Instead of accepting the default, you take a bit of initiative to seek out an option that might...
This is the core challenge of speaking up with an original idea. When you present a new suggestion, you’re not only hearing the tune in your head. You wrote the song. You’ve spent hours, days, weeks,...
There’s a particular kind of explanation that works especially well in enforcing discipline. When the Oliners examined the guidance of the Holocaust rescuers’ parents, they found that they tended to g...
The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I’ve spent more than a decade studying this, and it turns out to be far less difficult than I expecte...