Be otherish, not selfless
Help others in ways that also serve your own goals and interests.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Help others in ways that also serve your own goals and interests.
- Why it works: Grant distinguishes selfless givers (who sacrifice their interests entirely) from otherish ones (who care about others but also protect their own interests). Selfless givers burn out and end up at the bottom of performance distributions. Otherish givers align their generosity with their own strengths and interests, which makes giving sustainable and often generates personal skill development as a byproduct.
- Evidence: Backed by observational / correlational evidence.
- Avoid: Treating all requests equally and saying yes to everything, which depletes time and leads to resentment rather than genuine generosity.
Why it works
Grant distinguishes selfless givers (who sacrifice their interests entirely) from otherish ones (who care about others but also protect their own interests). Selfless givers burn out and end up at the bottom of performance distributions. Otherish givers align their generosity with their own strengths and interests, which makes giving sustainable and often generates personal skill development as a byproduct.
How to do it
- 1List the types of help you genuinely enjoy giving — mentoring, connecting, problem-solving, reviewing.
- 2Focus most of your giving on those domains; decline or delegate requests outside them.
- 3When evaluating a helping opportunity, ask: “Does this align with something I care about or want to build?”
- 4Be transparent that you have interests too — it doesn’t undermine generosity, it makes it sustainable.
What the evidence says
ObservationalGrant found that givers who set giving constraints and focused on intrinsically motivating help performed better and burned out less than those who gave indiscriminately.
Honest caveat: Distinguishing “otherish” from “selfless” is a conceptual distinction; the empirical data is survey-based and cannot fully isolate this variable from personality and context.
- — Grant (2013), Give and Take
Common mistake
Treating all requests equally and saying yes to everything, which depletes time and leads to resentment rather than genuine generosity.
IX Coach helps you map your giving strengths so you can help in ways that energise you, not drain you.
Practice this with IX Coach →