I've been thinking a lot about a TED Talk from Adam Grant, Adam Grant: Are you a giver or a taker?, and I've found that it seems to explain a lot of problems that we have relating to each other.

• In the workplace it helps to understand why the emphsis on profit over everything else is a poor idea.
  • This often emanates from the highest level of the organization. To my mind, it is because what we call leadership today really isn't. I think that being a leader requires nurturing everyone you employ to be their best. When a business runs that way, great things happen. But what I've often experienced is something more akin to the master-slave relationships of yore, with morale and ability to do good work very low.
  • It also helps explain why some givers burn out or withdraw, diminishing the ability of the entire group to perform.
• In our personal lives, I have seen relationships turn to cold despair and bitterness when one partner continually exhausts all that the other partner has to give.
  • Both parties in a relationship need to feel appreciated and loved by the other one. One person continually taking from the other perverts this.

In both cases I can see how this dysfunction does violence to our dignity and self-worth, and the results drag both givers and takers down. It is like the childrens fairy tale about the goose that laid the golden egg; in his greed to get more golden eggs faster, the owner killed the goose. When it was cut open, there was nothing inside.

I think it is time we paid more attention to the foundation of every relationship, whether personal or on the job. I speak from experience when I say that nothing that I know of destroys my ability to be creative, or even feel love, than a relationship where one person abuses the other by taking continually and giving nothing back.

I'd like to ask my readers to take a look at Adam Grant's video, then look around you. Don't take my opinion as truth; see if what you observe fits or it doesn't. You may well understand things that I don't see, and that is good! My job here with this type of post is to ask you to think about something you may have not considered before and make your own discoveries - if YOU want to.

Till next time,

Duane