Why? Research shows that when we take others’ perspectives, we tend to stay within our own
frames of reference, asking “How would I feel in this situation?” When we’re giving a gift, we
imagine the joy that we would experience in receiving the gifts that we’re selecting. But this isn’t the
same joy that the recipient will experience, because the recipient has a different set of preferences. In
the giver’s role, my wife loved the candlesticks she picked out. But if our friends were enamored
with those candlesticks, they would have put them on their gift registry.
To effectively help colleagues, people need to step outside their own frames of reference. As
George Meyer did, they need to ask, “How will the recipient feel in this situation?” This capacity to
see the world from another person’s perspective develops very early in life. In one experiment,
Berkeley psychologists Betty Repacholi and Alison Gopnik studied fourteen-month-old and eighteen-
month-old toddlers. The toddlers had two bowls of food in front of them: one with goldfish crackers
and one with broccoli. The toddlers tasted food from both bowls, showing a strong preference for
goldfish crackers over broccoli. Then, they watched a researcher express disgust while tasting the
crackers and delight while tasting the broccoli. When the researcher held out her hand and asked for
some food, the toddlers had a chance to offer either the crackers or the broccoli to the researcher.
Would they travel outside their own perspectives and give her the broccoli, even though they
themselves hated it?
The fourteen-month-olds didn’t, but the eighteen-month-olds did. At fourteen months, 87 percent
shared the goldfish crackers instead of the broccoli. By eighteen months, only 31 percent made this
mistake while 69 percent had learned to share what others liked, even if it differed from what they
liked. This ability to imagine other people’s perspectives, rather than getting stuck in our own
perspectives, is a signature skill of successful givers in collaborations. Interestingly, when George
Meyer first started his career as a comedy writer, he didn’t use his perspective-taking skills in the
service of helping his colleagues. He saw his fellow writers as rivals:
When you start out, you see other people as obstacles to your success. But that
means your world will be full of obstacles, which is bad. In the early years,
when some of my colleagues and friends—even close friends—would have a
rip-roaring success of some kind, it was hard for me. I would feel jealousy, that
their success somehow was a reproach to me. When you start your career,
naturally you’re mainly interested in advancing yourself and promoting yourself.But as Meyer worked on television shows, he began to run into the same people over and over. It
was a small world, and a connected one. “I realized it’s a very small pond. There are only a few
hundred people at any one time writing television comedy for a living,” Meyer says. “It’s a good idea
not to alienate these guys, and most of the jobs you get are more or less through word of mouth, or a
recommendation. It’s really important to have a good reputation. I quickly learned to see other
comedy writers as allies.” Meyer began to root for other people to succeed. “It’s not a zero-sum
game. So if you hear that somebody got a pilot picked up, or one of their shows went to series, in a
way that’s really good, because comedy is doing better.”
This wasn’t the path that Frank Lloyd Wright followed. He was undoubtedly a genius, but he
wasn’t a genius maker. When Wright succeeded, it didn’t multiply the success of other architects; it
usually came at their expense. As Wright’s son John reflected, “You do a good job building your