Selfish, Selfless, and Otherish Givers—and Which You Want to be

Welcome to buildbetter, your weekly guide to understanding and building meaningful relationships in all aspects of your life.

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Read time: 4 minutes

Today at a glance:

• Topic: Selfish, selfish and otherish givers

• Tactic: Shifting your giving style towards otherish

• Quote on motivations

• Devin's Finds: 📰, 📕, 🎞

• Commitments: 🤝

I've always considered myself a giver. But when I started writing this newsletter, I wanted to see how much more I could give. Everything I read told me give, give, give and don't ask for anything in return. That type of giving could come back to you 10x down the line.

I loved that idea because I already genuinely enjoyed the feeling of helping others. Whether it was a connection to someone else in my network, collaborating on a short term project or even co-hosting an event, the opportunity to meet interesting people that I related to was more than enough to keep me going. If there were other tangible benefits down the road, that was just icing on the cake.

So I decided I would commit way more of my time to giving. I started going to 3+ events each week to meet new people and find ways to give. At first it felt great. Each time I helped someone, I felt a similar level of that helper's high. But that feeling soon topped out. I noticed that I was overextending myself, even giving to those I barely knew. At one point I was committing almost 20 hours of giving to others weekly through attending 5+ events, scheduling calls with 7+ people, and working numerous side projects. I started putting giving ahead of making time for my fiancé, family, friends and most importantly, myself. The people that inspired me to build meaningful relationships in the first place were taking a back seat to anyone that asked for help.

I quickly learned that everyone I spoke to and everything I read about giving forgot to mention a very important caveat—that if you only give selflessly, you can quickly burn yourself out and that’s exactly what was happening to me.

So why is it that some givers burn out while others continue to feel energized by what they do?

After reading Adam Grant's book Give and Take, I had a much better understanding of where giving leads to fulfillment vs. burnout and how I could steer towards the former.

Givers: Selfless, Selfish, and Otherish

First, it's important to understand the two key motivations behind givers and takers: self-interest and other-interest. Self-interest involves pursuing power and achievement while other-interest involves being focused on generosity and helping others.

We often assume that Givers must score very high in other-interest and low in self-interest. While takers consist of all self-interest and almost no other-interest.

But in reality, a Giver with high others interest and low self-interest ends up giving their time and energy without any regard for their own needs. Adam Grant refers to people like this as selfless givers and they suffer from a form of pathological altruism where their unhealthy focus on others becomes a detriment to their own needs.

Meanwhile, if you understand this and overcorrect to a selfish giver, you end up becoming a very transactional person and always expect something in return. Which isn't much better than just becoming a taker who exhibits high self-interest tendencies. 

Because of this juxtaposition people think self-interest and other-interest sit on opposite ends of the same spectrum. But it turns out that these are completely independent motivations. When used in the right proportion, you become the most effective type of giver, an otherish giver. These givers care about benefiting others, but also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests. This is how it looks on a chart:

It's important to give more than you receive, but it's even more important to clearly understand what your true interests are. By doing so, you can use them to establish boundaries for who, when, where, and how you give. If you don't, your giving can quickly become overwhelming and self-detrimental.

Adam Grant sums this up well:

When I started to realign parts of my giving with certain self-interest, I started to feel that helper's high across all of my giving. I began to reprioritize time for my partner, family, friends, and most importantly achieving my mission at scale.

Giving only selflessly can trick us into believing we are making loads of new relationships. But if instead of nurturing the right ones, you focus on overwriting them with new ones, you’ve lost track of the meaning in meaningful relationships.

Quote on Motivations

People are more successful, in all aspects of their lives, when they are driven by this hybrid engine.

Devin's Finds:

📰 Bill Gates’ speech at the World Economic Forum in 2008 (15 minute read): Bill Gates suggests businesses take on an “otherish giver” mentality by advocating for creative capitalism where businesses pursue profits while also addressing societal needs, especially for the poorest. He emphasizes that while technology and capitalism have improved lives, they often neglect the most needy. He suggests by realigning incentives, we can focus on innovation that benefits both wealthy and poor communities.

📕 Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard (275 page book or 1 hour podcast summary): This is the story about the unconventional way Patagonia came to be through its founder, Yvon Chouinard. It’s a business focused on sustainability, environmental responsibility and whose sole purpose is to give back on both of those fronts. Chouinard shows how giving back, focusing on employee well-being, and environmental activism can result in building one of the most notable brands in the world.

🎞 A two minute real of a poem on growing apart from friends as we go through different phases of our life. The friendships will change, but they don’t have to go away completely ⬇

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Best of luck building,

Devin