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David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants Kindle Edition
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Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a stone and a sling, and ever since then the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants. David's victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn't have won.
Or should he have?
In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwellchallenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks.
Gladwell begins with the real story of what happened between the giant and the shepherd boy those many years ago. From there, David and Goliath examines Northern Ireland's Troubles, the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, murder and the high costs of revenge, and the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms—all to demonstrate how much of what is beautiful and important in the world arises from what looks like suffering and adversity.
In the tradition of Gladwell's previous bestsellers—The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw—David and Goliath draws upon history, psychology, and powerful storytelling to reshape the way we think of the world around us.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLittle, Brown and Company
- Publication dateOctober 1, 2013
- File size1366 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Review
As always, Gladwell's sweep is breathtaking and thought provoking.
-- "New York Times"Fascinating...Gladwell is a master of synthesis. This perennially bestselling author prides himself on radical re-thinking and urges the rest of us to follow suit.
-- "Washington Post"Pop-culture pundit Malcolm Gladwell is an idea blender, mixing concepts from vastly different sources (everything from business to science to the Bible) to produce new ways of seeing the world.
-- "Reader's Digest"Gladwell's bestsellers, such as The Tipping Point and Outliers, have changed the way we think about sociological changes and the factors that contribute to high levels of success. Here he examines and challenges our concepts of 'advantage' and 'disadvantage' in a way that may seem intuitive to some and surprising to others. Beginning with the classic tale of David and Goliath and moving through history with figures such as Lawrence of Arabia and Martin Luther King Jr., Gladwell shows how, time and again, players labeled 'underdog' use that status to their advantage and prevail through the elements of cunning and surprise...As usual, Gladwell presents his research in a fresh and easy-to-understand context.
-- "Booklist (starred review)"Contemporary society can't escape history when Malcolm Gladwell explains the world as he does with David and Goliath.
-- "St. Louis Post-Dispatch"Engrossing...Gladwell's singular gift is animating the experience of his subjects. He has an uncanny ability to simplify without being simplistic: clean and vivid Strunk and White prose in the service of peerless storytelling.
-- "Seattle Times"A far- and free-ranging meditation on the age-old struggle between underdogs and top dogs...In addition to the top-notch writing one expects from a New Yorker regular, Gladwell rewards readers with moving stories, surprising insights, and consistently provocative ideas.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"What propels the book, like all of Gladwell's writing, is his intoxicating brand of storytelling. He is the master of mixing familiar elements with surprise counter-intuitions and then seasoning with a sprinkling of scientific evidence....Gladwell is a master craftsman, an outlier amongst authors.
-- "Huffington Post"Gladwell has long proven to be a capable narrator of his own books, and this production reflects his continued success. The work posits that personal obstacles may not always be detrimental-that they can, in fact, help some people outperform others. Gladwell steeps his research in interconnected anecdotes that require a good deal of storytelling, a structure that works well for audio. His vocal delivery commands the attention of listeners through tone, pacing, and well-placed pauses. At times, his delivery feels so natural and conversational that listeners can almost feel his presence in the room.
-- "AudioFile"David and Goliath readers will travel with colorful characters who overcame great difficulties and learn fascinating facts about the Battle of Britain, cancer medicine, and the struggle for civil rights, to name just a few topics upon which Mr. Gladwell's wide-ranging narrative touches. This is an entertaining book.
-- "Wall Street Journal"Truly intriguing and inspiring, especially when Gladwell discusses 'desirable difficulties'...Gladwell's account of the journey of Dr. Emil 'Jay' Freireich is unforgettable.
-- "Los Angeles Times"Gladwell has made a career out of questioning conventional wisdom, and here he examines the allegedly unlikely triumph of the weak over the mighty and shows it's not so unlikely after all. Four stars.
-- "People"The fifty-year-old Canadian is a superstar, the most popular staff writer on the New Yorker and a hero in the frequent-flier lounge where journalism, social science, business management, and self-help hang out....It's a good story, and he's got plenty more.
-- "Oregonian"Gladwell's most provocative book yet. David and Goliath challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, drawing upon history, psychology, and powerful narrative talent to rethink how we view the world around us and how to deal with the challenges life throws at us.
-- "Columbus Dispatch"Provocative....David and Goliath is a lean, consuming read...The book's most crafty, engaging chapter ties together the Impressionist movement and college choices to highlight the fact that gaining admission to elite institutions, which we typically perceive as an advantage, is no guarantee of success.
-- "San Francisco Chronicle "Gladwell sells books by the millions because he is masterful at explaining how the world works-the power of critical mass, the arbitrariness of success, etc.-packaging his ideas in fun, accessible, and poignant vignettes.
-- "USA Today"About the Author
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1996. He is a former writer at the Washington Post and served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He has won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of four books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, and Outliers: The Story of Success, all of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. His book What the Dog Saw is a compilation of stories published in the New Yorker. Gladwell graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
David and Goliath
Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
By Malcolm GladwellLittle, Brown and Company
Copyright © 2013 Malcolm GladwellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-20436-1
CHAPTER 1
At the heart of ancient Palestine is the region known as the Shephelah, a seriesof ridges and valleys connecting the Judaean Mountains to the east with thewide, flat expanse of the Mediterranean plain. It is an area of breathtakingbeauty, home to vineyards and wheat fields and forests of sycamore andterebinth. It is also of great strategic importance.
Over the centuries, numerous battles have been fought for control of the regionbecause the valleys rising from the Mediterranean plain offer those on the coasta clear path to the cities of Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem in the Judaeanhighlands. The most important valley is Aijalon, in the north. But the moststoried is the Elah. The Elah was where Saladin faced off against the Knights ofthe Crusades in the twelfth century. It played a central role in the Maccabeanwars with Syria more than a thousand years before that, and, most famously,during the days of the Old Testament, it was where the fledgling Kingdom ofIsrael squared off against the armies of the Philistines.
The Philistines were from Crete. They were a seafaring people who had moved toPalestine and settled along the coast. The Israelites were clustered in themountains, under the leadership of King Saul. In the second half of the eleventhcentury bce, the Philistines began moving east, winding their way upstream alongthe floor of the Elah Valley. Their goal was to capture the mountain ridge nearBethlehem and split Saul's kingdom in two. The Philistines were battle-testedand dangerous, and the sworn enemies of the Israelites. Alarmed, Saul gatheredhis men and hastened down from the mountains to confront them.
The Philistines set up camp along the southern ridge of the Elah. The Israelitespitched their tents on the other side, along the northern ridge, which left thetwo armies looking across the ravine at each other. Neither dared to move. Toattack meant descending down the hill and then making a suicidal climb up theenemy's ridge on the other side. Finally, the Philistines had enough. They senttheir greatest warrior down into the valley to resolve the deadlock one on one.
He was a giant, six foot nine at least, wearing a bronze helmet and full bodyarmor. He carried a javelin, a spear, and a sword. An attendant preceded him,carrying a large shield. The giant faced the Israelites and shouted out: "Chooseyou a man and let him come down to me! If he prevail in battle against me andstrike me down, we shall be slaves to you. But if I prevail and strike him down,you will be slaves to us and serve us."
In the Israelite camp, no one moved. Who could win against such a terrifyingopponent? Then, a shepherd boy who had come down from Bethlehem to bring food tohis brothers stepped forward and volunteered. Saul objected: "You cannot goagainst this Philistine to do battle with him, for you are a lad and he is a manof war from his youth." But the shepherd was adamant. He had faced moreferocious opponents than this, he argued. "When the lion or the bear would comeand carry off a sheep from the herd," he told Saul, "I would go after him andstrike him down and rescue it from his clutches." Saul had no other options. Herelented, and the shepherd boy ran down the hill toward the giant standing inthe valley. "Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavensand the beasts of the field," the giant cried out when he saw his opponentapproach. Thus began one of history's most famous battles. The giant's name wasGoliath. The shepherd boy's name was David.
CHAPTER 2David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary peopleconfront giants. By "giants," I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—fromarmies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression. Eachchapter tells the story of a different person—famous or unknown, ordinaryor brilliant—who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced torespond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall Ipersevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive?
Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much ofwhat we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsidedconflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness andbeauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. Wemisread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. Thesame qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of greatweakness. And the fact of being an underdog can change people in waysthat we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities andeducate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemedunthinkable. We need a better guide to facing giants—and there is nobetter place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation betweenDavid and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah.
When Goliath shouted out to the Israelites, he was asking for what was known as"single combat." This was a common practice in the ancient world. Two sides in aconflict would seek to avoid the heavy bloodshed of open battle by choosing onewarrior to represent each in a duel. For example, the first-century bce Romanhistorian Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius tells of an epic battle in which a Gaulwarrior began mocking his Roman opponents. "This immediately aroused the greatindignation of one Titus Manlius, a youth of the highest birth," Quadrigariuswrites. Titus challenged the Gaul to a duel:
He stepped forward, and would not suffer Roman valour to be shamefully tarnishedby a Gaul. Armed with a legionary's shield and a Spanish sword, he confrontedthe Gaul. Their fight took place on the very bridge [over the Anio River] in thepresence of both armies, amid great apprehension. Thus they confronted eachother: the Gaul, according to his method of fighting, with shield advanced andawaiting an attack; Manlius, relying on courage rather than skill, struck shieldagainst shield and threw the Gaul off balance. While the Gaul was trying toregain the same position, Manlius again struck shield against shield and againforced the man to change his ground. In this fashion he slipped under the Gaul'ssword and stabbed him in the chest with his Spanish blade.... After he had slainhim, Manlius cut off the Gaul's head, tore off his tongue and put it, covered asit was with blood, around his own neck.
This is what Goliath was expecting—a warrior like himself to come forwardfor hand-to-hand combat. It never occurred to him that the battle would befought on anything other than those terms, and he prepared accordingly. Toprotect himself against blows to the body, he wore an elaborate tunic made up ofhundreds of overlapping bronze fishlike scales. It covered his arms and reachedto his knees and probably weighed more than a hundred pounds. He had bronze shinguards protecting his legs, with attached bronze plates covering his feet. Hewore a heavy metal helmet. He had three separate weapons, all optimized forclose combat. He held a thrusting javelin made entirely of bronze, which wascapable of penetrating a shield or even armor. He had a sword on his hip. And ashis primary option, he carried a special kind of short-range spear with a metalshaft as "thick as a weaver's beam." It had a cord attached to it and anelaborate set of weights that allowed it to be released with extraordinary forceand accuracy. As the historian Moshe Garsiel writes, "To the Israelites, thisextraordinary spear, with its heavy shaft plus long and heavy iron blade, whenhurled by Goliath's strong arm, seemed capable of piercing any bronze shield andbronze armor together." Can you see why no Israelite would come forward to fightGoliath?
Then David appears. Saul tries to give him his own sword and armor so at leasthe'll have a fighting chance. David refuses. "I cannot walk in these," he says,"for I am unused to it." Instead he reaches down and picks up five smoothstones, and puts them in his shoulder bag. Then he descends into the valley,carrying his shepherd's staff. Goliath looks at the boy coming toward him and isinsulted. He was expecting to do battle with a seasoned warrior. Instead he seesa shepherd—a boy from one of the lowliest of all professions—whoseems to want to use his shepherd's staff as a cudgel against Goliath's sword."Am I a dog," Goliath says, gesturing at the staff, "that you should come to mewith sticks?"
What happens next is a matter of legend. David puts one of his stones into theleather pouch of a sling, and he fires at Goliath's exposed forehead. Goliathfalls, stunned. David runs toward him, seizes the giant's sword, and cuts offhis head. "The Philistines saw that their warrior was dead," the biblicalaccount reads, "and they fled."
The battle is won miraculously by an underdog who, by all expectations, shouldnot have won at all. This is the way we have told one another the story over themany centuries since. It is how the phrase "David and Goliath" has come to beembedded in our language—as a metaphor for improbable victory. And theproblem with that version of the events is that almost everything about it iswrong.
CHAPTER 3Ancient armies had three kinds of warriors. The first was cavalry—armedmen on horseback or in chariots. The second was infantry—foot soldierswearing armor and carrying swords and shields. The third were projectilewarriors, or what today would be called artillery: archers and, most important,slingers. Slingers had a leather pouch attached on two sides by a long strand ofrope. They would put a rock or a lead ball into the pouch, swing it around inincreasingly wider and faster circles, and then release one end of the rope,hurling the rock forward.
Slinging took an extraordinary amount of skill and practice. But in experiencedhands, the sling was a devastating weapon. Paintings from medieval times showslingers hitting birds in midflight. Irish slingers were said to be able to hita coin from as far away as they could see it, and in the Old Testament Book ofJudges, slingers are described as being accurate within a "hair's breadth." Anexperienced slinger could kill or seriously injure a target at a distance of upto two hundred yards. [The modern world record for slinging a stone was set in1981 by Larry Bray: 437 meters. Obviously, at that distance, accuracy suffers.]The Romans even had a special set of tongs made just to remove stones that hadbeen embedded in some poor soldier's body by a sling. Imagine standing in frontof a Major League Baseball pitcher as he aims a baseball at your head. That'swhat facing a slinger was like—only what was being thrown was not a ballof cork and leather but a solid rock.
The historian Baruch Halpern argues that the sling was of such importance inancient warfare that the three kinds of warriors balanced one another, like eachgesture in the game of rock, paper, scissors. With their long pikes and armor,infantry could stand up to cavalry. Cavalry could, in turn, defeat projectilewarriors, because the horses moved too quickly for artillery to take proper aim.And projectile warriors were deadly against infantry, because a big lumberingsoldier, weighed down with armor, was a sitting duck for a slinger who waslaunching projectiles from a hundred yards away. "This is why the Athenianexpedition to Sicily failed in the Peloponnesian War," Halpern writes."Thucydides describes at length how Athens's heavy infantry was decimated in themountains by local light infantry, principally using the sling."
Goliath is heavy infantry. He thinks that he is going to be engaged in a duelwith another heavy-infantryman, in the same manner as Titus Manlius's fight withthe Gaul. When he says, "Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds ofthe heavens and the beasts of the field," the key phrase is "come to me." Hemeans come right up to me so that we can fight at close quarters. When Saultries to dress David in armor and give him a sword, he is operating under thesame assumption. He assumes David is going to fight Goliath hand to hand.
David, however, has no intention of honoring the rituals of single combat. Whenhe tells Saul that he has killed bears and lions as a shepherd, he does so notjust as testimony to his courage but to make another point as well: that heintends to fight Goliath the same way he has learned to fight wildanimals—as a projectile warrior.
He runs toward Goliath, because without armor he has speed andmaneuverability. He puts a rock into his sling, and whips it around and around,faster and faster at six or seven revolutions per second, aiming his projectileat Goliath's forehead—the giant's only point of vulnerability. EitanHirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defense Forces, recently did aseries of calculations showing that a typical-size stone hurled by an expertslinger at a distance of thirty-five meters would have hit Goliath's head with avelocity of thirty-four meters per second—more than enough to penetratehis skull and render him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, thatis equivalent to a fair-size modern handgun. "We find," Hirsch writes, "thatDavid could have slung and hit Goliath in little more than one second—atime so brief that Goliath would not have been able to protect himself andduring which he would be stationary for all practical purposes."
What could Goliath do? He was carrying over a hundred pounds of armor. He wasprepared for a battle at close range, where he could stand, immobile, wardingoff blows with his armor and delivering a mighty thrust of his spear. He watchedDavid approach, first with scorn, then with surprise, and then with what canonly have been horror—as it dawned on him that the battle he was expectinghad suddenly changed shape.
"You come against me with sword and spear and javelin," David said to Goliath,"but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armiesof Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into myhands, and I'll strike you down and cut off your head.... All those gatheredhere will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for thebattle is the Lord, and he will give all of you into our hands."
Twice David mentions Goliath's sword and spear, as if to emphasize howprofoundly different his intentions are. Then he reaches into his shepherd's bagfor a stone, and at that point no one watching from the ridges on either side ofthe valley would have considered David's victory improbable. David was aslinger, and slingers beat infantry, hands down.
"Goliath had as much chance against David," the historian Robert Dohrenwendwrites, "as any Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an[opponent] armed with a .45 automatic pistol."
CHAPTER 4Why has there been so much misunderstanding around that day in the Valley ofElah? On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power.The reason King Saul is skeptical of David's chances is that David is small andGoliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn'tappreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules,in substituting speed and surprise for strength. Saul is not alone in makingthis mistake. In the pages that follow, I'm going to argue that we continue tomake that error today, in ways that have consequences for everything from how weeducate our children to how we fight crime and disorder.
But there's a second, deeper issue here. Saul and the Israelites think they knowwho Goliath is. They size him up and jump to conclusions about what they thinkhe is capable of. But they do not really see him. The truth is that Goliath'sbehavior is puzzling. He is supposed to be a mighty warrior. But he's not actinglike one. He comes down to the valley floor accompanied by an attendant—aservant walking before him, carrying a shield. Shield bearers in ancient timesoften accompanied archers into battle because a soldier using a bow and arrowhad no free hand to carry any kind of protection on his own. But why doesGoliath, a man calling for sword-on-sword single combat, need to be assisted bya third party carrying an archer's shield?
(Continues...)Excerpted from David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. Copyright © 2013 Malcolm Gladwell. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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- Publisher : Little, Brown and Company; Illustrated edition (October 1, 2013)
- Publication date : October 1, 2013
- Language : English
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About the author
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York.
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On the title pages of the books I read for these reviews, I usually list 10 to 20 page numbers—with the best stuff I want to talk about.
This book: 45 bullet points, all worthy of long paragraphs. It’s pure torture knowing I can’t mention most of them. You gotta read this bestselling book!
Malcolm Gladwell is a master at his craft with bestsellers like Outliers: The Story of Success, Blink and The Tipping Point. His latest, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, is classic Gladwell.
He writes, “David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By ‘giants,’ I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person—famous or unknown, ordinary or brilliant, who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive?”
In these memorable stories (I’ve already shared half-a-dozen relevant vignettes with colleagues in the last 10 days), Gladwell explores two ideas: 1) sometimes “the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty,” and 2) we “consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are.”
So rather than a dozen spoiler alerts here…I’ll give you a True or False test. Mark “True” if you think the following notes are from David and Goliath.
TRUE OR FALSE?
#1. In the mid-1950s, Swedish furniture manufacturers boycotted IKEA, angry over his low prices. So in 1961, at the peak of the Cold War, IKEA’s founder did business with manufacturers in Poland—the equivalent today of “Walmart setting up shop in North Korea.”
#2. Based on the statistical history of wars—the David vs. Goliath types—if Canada waged an unconventional war on the U.S., “history would suggest you ought to put your money on Canada.”
#3. In discussing the relationship between parenting and wealth, “The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around $75,000 a year.”
#4. “The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the ‘Big Fish—Little Pond Effect.’ The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.”
#5. So…where should your kids attend college? Research on college grads concludes that “the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.”
Gladwell divides his stunning findings (told through page-turner true stories) into three parts: 1) “The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages),” 2) “The Theory of Desirable Difficulty,” and 3) “The Limits of Power.”
More True or False:
#6. “We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants.”
#7. In Gladwell’s up-close-and-personal interview with a world class attorney who has dyslexia, the lawyer talks about the advantages of his disadvantages. “Not being able to read a lot and learning by listening and asking questions means that I need to simplify issues to their basics. And that is very powerful, because in trial cases, judges and jurors—neither of them have the time or the ability to become experts in the subject. One of my strengths is presenting a case that they can understand.”
#8. George Bernard Shaw once said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
#9. In response to Birmingham police jailing hundreds of children who skipped school to march in the Civil Rights demonstrations, Martin Luther King responded, “Jail helps you to rise about the miasma of everyday life. If they want some books, we will get them. I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.”
#10. A California father, incensed at his daughter’s brutal murder, champions the Three Strikes Law, while a Canadian couple—Mennonites—forgive and move on; “a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish.”
Business leaders will appreciate this book, but I’m guessing nonprofit and church leaders will love it. They have “against all odds” challenges most days before breakfast. So, have we been looking at “disadvantages/giants” incorrectly? Why might disadvantages actually be advantages?
During World War II, the Germans pretty much gave up on disassembling a safe haven for Jews in the French mountain community of Le Chambon. Why? Gladwell says, “wiping out a town or a people or a movement is never as simple as it looks. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.”
I could go on, with another 35 or more mind-grabbing and soul-whacking notes, but I gotta stop. I hope you’ll read this book. Give it for Christmas and you’ll receive appreciative thank you notes. (By the way, all 10 statements above are “True.”)
As we’ve come to expect from a writer of his caliber, Gladwell grips you from the start, with the timeless story of David, the Israelite, and Goliath, the Philistine, and why the duel between them revealed the folly of our assumptions about power.
Gladwell argues that we “continue to make that error today, in ways that have consequences for everything, from how we educate our children, to how we fight crime and disorder.”
“Why,” he says, “do we automatically assume that someone who is smaller, or poorer, or less skilled is necessarily at a disadvantage?” Especially when history shows us that underdogs win more often than we think. “That’s because underdog strategies are hard,” he notes.
“To play by David’s rules, you have to be desperate,” he says. “You have to be so bad that you have no choice.” With stories from basketball to Lawrence of Arabia, he demonstrates how prestige and belonging to elite institutions (think MBAs), can actually limit our options. And how being an underdog and a misfit can give you the freedom to try things no one else has ever dreamt of.
He goes on to demonstrate, with some surprising statistics, how too small a class size and too much family wealth can, both be disadvantageous to children, and why it’s wrong to assume that being bigger, and stronger, and richer, is always in our best interest.
I found particularly fascinating the story of how the Impressionists succeeded by choosing to be the Big Fish in a Little Pond of their own creation. You’ll learn why the more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.
So, if you did not make it through to the IITs (or Harvard, Yale or MIT), take heart. It’s better to be a Big Fish in a Very Welcoming Small Pond than a Little Fish in a Very Big and Scary Pond, says Gladwell. And going to that less competitive college might be the best thing you’ll ever do for your self-confidence and your career.
While it might seem counterintuitive to talent hunters, statistics show that hiring the best students from “mediocre” schools would be better than going after good students from the very best schools. “We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is – and the definition isn’t right,” says Gladwell. “It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.”
My favourite part, however, was when, using the fact that an extraordinarily high number of successful entrepreneurs (including British billionaire, Richard Branson) are dyslexic, he asks the controversial question, “Can dyslexia turn out to be a desirable difficulty?” Could it be that they succeeded, in part, because of their disorder?
When something, like your sense of sight, is taken away from you, your brain compensates by sharpening your other senses. In the same way, could dyslexics learn to compensate for their reading difficulty by becoming better listeners and learning to understand the nuances of human communication better than their peers? That does seem to be the case. As Gladwell states, “What is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.”
But the dyslexics who succeed also seem to have a special brand of stubbornness coupled with a highly developed ability to deal with failure, and the tendency to not care a damn for the approval of others - qualities that many a successful entrepreneur shares. These are the coping strategies they developed in a world that looks down on those who cannot keep up academically, but that gave them an advantage in the world of business, where disruption is greatly valued.
Personally, I like to see these so-called disorders, that the psychiatric profession is so quick to diagnose nowadays, as “gifts” that help us see the world in ways that others can’t. I used to think it was just me (and a bunch of other people who believe in a more inclusive world) that thought this way, so Gladwell’s argument that being “differently-abled” can be turned into an advantage delights me.
I believe that we will, one day, see the same argument put to people with autism. The evidence is already there. We just need someone like Gladwell to dig it up for us.
In the vein of what doesn’t kill you make you stronger, his next chapter speaks of the acquired, uncommon courage of those who survive either an event like the bombing of London by the Germans, or of losing a parent in childhood.
It reminded me of the courage of the people of Mumbai who are known for going back to work the day after a bombing by terrorists. With so many “remote misses” to create a feeling of invincibility, no other city in India can claim such nonchalance in the face of terror.
It’s his chapter on Wyatt Walker that I find the most unsettling, where he defends Walker’s use of children in Birmingham’s civil rights marches. “Our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside,” states Gladwell.
Since Birmingham, child soldiers have been used by mercenaries like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone in their battle against the Goliaths they were fighting, with disastrous consequences for the children involved (if you want to understand what happened to the children drafted into the RUF, I recommend you watch the Leonardo DiCaprio starrer, Blood Diamond).
So, no, I don’t think Birmingham is really the right kind of example to make in the David vs Goliath battles, no matter how worthy the cause.
Weaving a common thread through the stories of crime in America, and the war between the Irish and Prostestants in Northern Ireland, Gladwell goes on to show how “the excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.”
Gladwell wraps up the book with the beautiful and heartwarming story of Andre' Trocme' and the village of Le Chambon in France that protected Jews in defiance of the Nazi invaders. As he notes so eloquently, “The powerful are not as powerful as they seem – nor the weak as weak.”
Top reviews from other countries
Unlike Gladwell's earlier works, this one takes tricky stories. Did MLK really use drama and connivance during civil rights movements? Did 3-strike law not work in halting criminality in California? Is rage an unjustified response to killing of your daughter? Story after story flows in masterful prose. The lessons might not be clearly laid out but those stories linger longer. Perhaps, like the last sentence of the book, this book may not stretch you - it might just thicken you. Highly recommend.