Rice professor Erik Dane finds that the more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world. He points to studies showing that expert br...
Research suggests that there are two fundamental paths to influence: dominance and prestige. When we establish dominance, we gain influence because others see us as strong, powerful, and authoritative...
Many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks—but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.
In roles as leaders and mentors, givers resist the temptation to search for talent first. By recognizing that anyone can be a bloomer, givers focus their attention on motivation. The
Even in seemingly independent jobs that rely on raw brainpower, our success depends more on others than we realize.
But there’s something distinctive that happens when givers succeed: it spreads and cascades.
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...
What motivates people to practice at such length in the first place? This is where givers often enter the picture.
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.
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself, Einstein lamented.
This chapter is about when to speak up and how to do it effectively without jeopardizing our careers and relationships. What
The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle.
The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past. You
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...
Teachers’ beliefs created self-fulfilling prophecies. When teachers believed their students were bloomers, they set high expectations for their success. As a result, the teachers engaged in more suppo...