Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

I read Adam Grant’s first book, Give and Take, in August 2017. It introduced me to his excellent framework for building your professional (and personal) network. It’s probably the most valuable book on “networking” ever written.

The core idea introduced in the book is that in any network, there are three kinds of nodes — the givers, the takers, and the matchers. While the terms may be fairly clear, here’s a quick recap: The givers enjoy helping others with no strings attached; the takers take without any intention of contributing much back; the matchers try to keep an even balance of their professional transactions.

Over the book, Adam makes a very strong case of becoming a giver node in every network you belong to. Empirically, both the most successful and the least successful people in any career path are givers — Adam provides a lot of practical advice to avoid getting exploited by others and making sure you manage your time well while being able to help others unconditionally as much as possible. This book also reminded me of Paul Graham’s essay on being _Relentlessly Resourceful _— another excellent piece that I highly recommend reading.

I’m going to be a bit of a cop-out this week and instead of summarizing this book myself, I’ll leave you with this excellent infographic I found on Adam Grant’s site that does the job way better than I can. Happy Sunday :)

This is #47 in a series of book reviews published weekly on this site.