Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

According to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity. If we want to succeed, we need a combination of hard work, talent, and luck.

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Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice.

Sampson knew he was fighting an uphill battle

This is what many venture capitalists do to stack the odds in their favor.

In contrast, Shader was a blue-chip entrepreneur who had hit the jackpot not once, but twice.

after burning the midnight oil at a law firm

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.
—attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, physicist, biologist, and artist

“Even when people are well intentioned,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “they tend to overvalue their own contributions and undervalue those of others.” This responsibility bias is a major source of failed collaborations. Professional relationships disintegrate when entrepreneurs, inventors, investors, and executives feel that their partners are not giving them the credit they deserve, or doing their fair share.

“Even when people are well intentioned,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “they tend to overvalue their own contributions and undervalue those of others.”

It appears that Jonas Salk made the same mistake as Frank Lloyd Wright: he saw himself as independent rather than interdependent.