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His real name was Abraham Lincoln.

In the 1830s, Lincoln was striving to be the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois, referencing a U.S. senator and New York governor who spearheaded the construction of the Erie Canal. When Lincoln withdrew from his first Senate race to help Lyman Trumbull win the seat, they shared a commitment to abolishing slavery. From emancipating slaves, to sacrificing his own political opportunities for the cause, to refusing to defend clients who appeared to be guilty, Lincoln consistently acted for the greater good. When
experts in history, political science, and psychology rated the presidents
, they identified Lincoln as a clear giver. “Even if it was inconvenient, Lincoln went out of his way to help others,” wrote two experts, demonstrating “obvious concern for the well-being of individual citizens.” It is noteworthy that Lincoln is seen as one of the least self-centered, egotistical, boastful presidents ever. In independent ratings of presidential biographies, Lincoln scored in the top three—along with Washington and Fillmore—in giving credit to others and acting in the best interests of others. In the words of a military general who worked with Lincoln, “he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.”

In the Oval Office, Lincoln was determined to put the good of the nation above his own ego. When he won the presidency in 1860, he invited the three candidates whom he defeated for the Republican nomination to become his secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, and attorney general. In
Team of Rivals,
the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin documents how unusual Lincoln’s cabinet was. “Every member of the administration was better known, better educated, and more experienced in public life than Lincoln. Their presence in the cabinet might have threatened to eclipse the obscure prairie lawyer.”

In Lincoln’s position, a taker might have preferred to protect his ego and power by inviting “yes men” to join him. A matcher might have offered appointments to allies who had supported him. Yet Lincoln invited his bitter competitors instead. “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet,” Lincoln told an incredulous reporter. “I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” Some of these rivals despised Lincoln, and others viewed him as incompetent, but he managed to win them all over. According to Kearns Goodwin, Lincoln’s “success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality—kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy—can also be impressive political resources.”

If politics can be fertile ground for givers, it’s possible that givers can succeed in any job. Whether giving is effective, though, depends on the particular kind of exchange in which it’s employed. This is one important feature of giving to keep in mind as we move through the ideas in this book: on any particular morning, giving may well be incompatible with success. In purely zero-sum situations and win-lose interactions, giving rarely pays off. This is a lesson that Abraham Lincoln learned each time he chose to give to others at his own expense. “If I have one vice,” Lincoln said, “and I can call it nothing else—it is not to be able to say no!”

But most of life isn’t zero-sum, and on balance, people who choose giving as their primary reciprocity style end up reaping rewards. For Lincoln, like David Hornik, seemingly self-sacrificing decisions ultimately worked to his advantage. When we initially concluded that Lincoln and Hornik lost, we hadn’t stretched the time horizons out far enough. It takes time for givers to build goodwill and trust, but eventually, they establish reputations and relationships that enhance their success. In fact, you’ll see that in sales and medical school, the giver advantage grows over time. In the long run, giving can be every bit as powerful as it is dangerous. As Chip Conley, the renowned entrepreneur who founded Joie de Vivre Hotels, explains, “Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s
valuable in a marathon
.”

In Lincoln’s era, the marathon took a long time to run. Without telephones, the Internet, and high-speed transportation, building relationships and reputations was a slow process. “In the old world, you could send a letter, and no one knew,” Conley says. Conley believes that in today’s connected world, where relationships and reputations are more visible, givers can accelerate their pace. “You
no longer have to choose
,” says Bobbi Silten, the former president of Dockers, who now runs global social and environmental responsibility for Gap Inc. “You can be a giver
and
be successful.”

The fact that the long run is getting shorter isn’t the only force that makes giving more professionally productive today. We live in an era when massive changes in the structure of work—and the technology that shapes it—have further amplified the advantages of being a giver. Today, more than half of American and European
companies regularly use teams
to get work done. We rely on teams to build cars and houses, perform surgeries, fly planes, fight wars, play symphonies, produce news reports, audit companies, and provide consulting services. Teams depend on givers to share information, volunteer for unpopular tasks, and provide help.

When Lincoln invited his rivals to join his cabinet, they had the chance to see firsthand how much he was willing to contribute for the sake of other people and his country. Several years before Lincoln became president, one of his rivals, Edwin Stanton, had rejected him as a cocounsel in a trial, calling him a “gawky, long-armed ape.” Yet after working with Lincoln, Stanton described him as “the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen.” As we organize more people into teams, givers have more opportunities to demonstrate their value, as Lincoln did.

Even if you don’t work in a team, odds are that you hold a service job. Most of our grandparents worked in independent jobs producing goods. They didn’t always need to collaborate with other people, so it was fairly inefficient to be a giver. But now, a high percentage of people work in interconnected jobs providing services to others. In the 1980s, the service sector made up about half of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP). By 1995, the service sector was responsible for nearly two thirds of world GDP. Today, more than 80 percent of Americans work in service jobs.

As the
service sector continues to expand
, more and more people are placing a premium on providers who have established relationships and reputations as givers. Whether your reciprocity style is primarily giver, taker, or matcher, I’m willing to bet that you want your key service providers to be givers. You hope your doctor, lawyer, teacher, dentist, plumber, and real estate agent will focus on contributing value to you, not on claiming value from you. This is why David Hornik has an 89 percent success rate: entrepreneurs know that when he offers to invest in their companies, he has their best interests at heart. Whereas many venture capitalists don’t consider unsolicited pitches, preferring to spend their scarce time on people and ideas that have already shown promise, Hornik responds personally to e-mails from complete strangers. “I’m happy to be as helpful as I can independent of whether I have some economic interest,” he says. According to Hornik, a successful venture capitalist is “a service provider. Entrepreneurs are not here to serve venture capitalists. We are here to serve entrepreneurs.”

The rise of the service economy sheds light on why givers have the worst grades and the best grades in medical school. In the study of Belgian medical students, the givers earned significantly lower grades in their first year of medical school. The givers were at a disadvantage—and the negative correlation between giver scores and grades was stronger than the effect of smoking on the odds of getting lung cancer.

But that was the only year of medical school in which the givers underperformed. By their second year, the givers had made up the gap: they were now slightly outperforming their peers. By the sixth year, the givers earned substantially higher grades than their peers. A giver style, measured
six years earlier
, was a better predictor of medical school grades than the effect of smoking on lung cancer rates (and the effect of using nicotine patches on quitting smoking). By the seventh year of medical school, when the givers became doctors, they had climbed still further ahead. The effect of giving on final medical school performance was stronger than the smoking effects above; it was even greater than the effect of drinking alcohol on aggressive behavior.

Why did the giver disadvantage reverse, becoming such a strong advantage?

Nothing about the givers changed, but their program did. As students progress through medical school, they move from independent classes into clinical rotations, internships, and patient care. The further they advance, the more their success depends on teamwork and service. As the structure of class work shifts, the givers benefit from their natural tendencies to collaborate effectively with other medical professionals and express concern to patients.

This giver advantage in service roles is hardly limited to medicine. Steve Jones, the award-winning former CEO of one of the largest banks in Australia, wanted to know what made
financial advisers
successful. His team studied key factors such as financial expertise and effort. But “the single most influential factor,” Jones told me, “was whether a financial adviser
had the client’s best interests at heart, above the company’s and even his own. It was one of my three top priorities to get that value instilled, and demonstrate that it’s in everybody’s best interests to treat clients that way.”

One financial adviser who exemplifies this giver style is Peter Audet, a broad-shouldered Aussie who once wore a mullet and has an affinity for Bon Jovi. He began his career as a customer service representative answering phones for a large insurance company. The first year after he was hired, Peter won the Personality of the Year award, beating out hundreds of other employees based on his passion for helping customers, and became the youngest department supervisor in the whole company. Years later, when Peter joined a group of fifteen executives for a give-and-take exercise, the average executive offered help to three colleagues. Peter offered help to all fifteen of them. He is such a giver that he even tries to help the job applicants he doesn’t hire, spending hours making connections for them to find other opportunities.

In 2011, when Peter was working as a financial adviser, he received a call from an Australian client. The client wanted to make changes to a small superannuation fund valued at $70,000. A staff member was assigned to the client, but looked him up and saw that he was a scrap metal worker. Thinking like a matcher, the staff member declined to make the visit: it was a waste of his time. It certainly wasn’t worth Peter’s time. He specialized in high net worth clients, whose funds were worth a thousand times more money, and his largest client had more than $100 million. If you calculated the dollar value of Peter’s time, the scrap metal worker’s fund was not even worth the amount of time it would take to drive out to his house. “He was the tiniest client, and no one wanted to see him; it was beneath everybody,” Peter reflects. “But you can’t just ignore someone because you don’t think they’re important enough.”

Peter scheduled an appointment to drive out to see the scrap metal worker and help him with the plan changes. When he pulled up to the house, his jaw dropped. The front door was covered in cobwebs and had not been opened in months. He drove around to the back, where a thirty-four-year-old man opened the door. The living room was full of bugs, and he could see straight through to the roof: the entire ceiling had been ripped out. The client made a feeble gesture to some folding chairs, and Peter began working through the client’s plan changes. Feeling sympathy for the client, who seemed like an earnest, hardworking blue-collar man, Peter made a generous offer. “While I’m here, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself and I’ll see if there’s anything else I can help you with.”

The client mentioned a love of cars, and walked him around back to a dingy shed. Peter braced himself for another depressing display of poverty, envisioning a pile of rusted metal. When Peter stepped inside the shed, he gasped. Spread out before him in immaculate condition were a first-generation Chevy Camaro, built in 1966; two vintage Australian Valiant cars with 1,000-horsepower engines for drag racing; a souped-up coupe utility car; and a Ford coupe from the movie
Mad Max
. The client was not a scrap metal worker; he owned a lucrative scrap metal business. He had just bought the house to fix it up; it was on eleven acres, and it cost $1.4 million. Peter spent the next year reengineering the client’s business, improving his tax position, and helping him renovate the house. “All I did was start out by doing a kindness,” Peter notes. “When I got to work the next day, I had to laugh at my colleague who wasn’t prepared to give a bit by driving out to visit the client.” Peter went on to develop a strong relationship with the client, whose fees multiplied by a factor of a hundred the following year, and expects to continue working with him for decades.

Over the course of his career, giving has enabled Peter Audet to access opportunities that takers and matchers routinely miss, but it has also cost him dearly. As you’ll see in chapter 7, he was exploited by two takers who nearly put him out of business. Yet Peter managed to climb from the bottom to the top of the success ladder, becoming one of the more productive financial advisers in Australia. The key, he believes, was learning to harness the benefits of giving while minimizing the costs. As a managing director at Genesys Wealth Advisers, he managed to rescue his firm from the brink of bankruptcy and turn it into an industry leader, and he chalks his success up to being a giver. “There’s no doubt that I’ve succeeded in business because I give to other people. It’s my weapon of choice,” Peter says. “When I’m head-to-head with another adviser to try and win business, people tell me this is why I win.”