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