Give and Take: WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS

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 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.
Selfless givers are people with high other-interest and low self-interest. They give their time and
energy without regard for their own needs, and they pay a price for it. Selfless giving is a form of
pathological altruism, which is defined by researcher Barbara Oakley as “an unhealthy focus on
others to the detriment of one’s own needs,” such that in the process of trying to help others, givers
end up harming themselves. In one study, college students who scored high on selfless giving declined
in grades over the course of the semester. These selfless givers admitted “missing class and failing to
study because they were attending to friends’ problems.”
Most people assume that self-interest and other-interest are opposite ends of one continuum. Yet
in my studies of what drives people at work, I’ve consistently found that self-interest and other-
interest are completely independent motivations: you can have both of them at the same time. As Bill
Gates argued at the World Economic Forum, “there are two great forces of human nature: self-
interest, and caring for others,” and people are most successful when they are driven by a “hybrid
engine” of the two. If takers are selfish and failed givers are selfless, successful givers are otherish:
they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for advancing their own