David and Goliath Underdog Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants Pdf
Malcolm Gladwell loves to claiming the obvious. Or at least what nosotros all believe is the obvious. Every bit a staff writer for the New Yorker and writer of iv previous books, he has created a niche for himself by questioning assumptions that nosotros agree every bit breathy, undeniable, indisputable truths.
And he often proves them wrong.
Or he proves them right after all — but for a completely unlike reason than we ever imagined.
The beauty of Gladwell'south role equally an intellectual provocateur is that he jolts usa into seeing things anew. His New York Times bestsellers include What the Dog Saw, Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point, which all present fresh views of cultural commonplaces, from the mystique of ketchup to hero legends. Add to these his latest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (Petty, Brown, 2013), which shot straight up the bestseller lists and begins by reappraising one of the most famous stories of the Bible.
Gladwell counterintuitively explains that David really had everything on his side: speed, maneuverability, and a sling and rock that were deadly from a altitude. Goliath didn't stand a chance, and he should accept turned tail to run for the hills.
Our latter-24-hour interval misunderstanding of the truths behind the story of David and Goliath is itself the parable upon which Gladwell'south book is based. The first section is titled "The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages)."
"We spend a lot of fourth dimension thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off," he writes. "We don't spend enough fourth dimension thinking about the means in which those kinds of cloth advantages limit our options." And vice versa.
In the end, David and Goliath is a volume of empowerment. It'due south not feel-good self-help pabulum. Rather, Gladwell tells the stories of regular folk who are true Davids defeating existent-world Goliaths, like childhood leukemia, ceremonious-rights injustices, and fifty-fifty governments. And that's inspiring.
Q & A With Malcolm Gladwell
Feel Life | We often concur upwards the biblical story of David and Goliath as the ultimate underdog legend. Why after all these years do nosotros still misunderstand the tale?
Malcolm Gladwell | I begin David and Goliath with a reanalysis of that story, in which I bespeak out that Goliath is a good bargain less formidable than he appears, and David is a good bargain more than dangerous than he appears. David'due south victory is not as widely improbable as we recall, in other words.
Why have we misunderstood that story? Possibly information technology's because we find it more than exciting and romantic to imagine David's victory equally a i-in-a-meg occurrence. It makes for a ameliorate story if nosotros see him as weak and Goliath equally dogged. Only my argument is that that version of the story makes united states bullheaded to the fact that underdogs are rarely equally powerless every bit they seem. When we really sympathize that story, it becomes an incredibly hopeful bulletin for those who appear weak.
EL | What is it nigh the underdog that fascinates united states of america and then much? Why practise nosotros often ignore our common sense and want to root for the underdog?
MG | Is rooting for the underdog a failure of common sense? I'm not certain. I think the problem is that a world where the obvious favorite ever wins is incredibly depressing for the residuum of us. We need underdogs to win in gild to experience like lodge is just and that those without obvious advantages stand up a risk.
EL | Are in that location lessons we tin can learn for our own lives from the concept of underdogs?
MG |Absolutely. A number of the chapters in David and Goliath are near people who turned what seemed like disadvantages into advantages because they refused to exist passive in the face of adversity. One of the chapters is near how many dyslexics end upwardly as successful entrepreneurs. I talked to many people like this, and what was fascinating was how many of them said that their success came not in spite of their disability but because of it. Considering they couldn't read, they forced themselves to learn other things to compensate. You make it through school, if you can't practise the thing that schools require of y'all, by forming alliances with skilful students, negotiating with teachers, becoming a actually good problem solver, learning how to consul responsibilities, learning how to listen — all the things, in curt, that will stop up serving you very well in the existent earth. What all those people had in mutual, in other words, was a refusal to think of their disability as a disability. They viewed it as an opportunity to learn a new fashion of doing things. That's the lesson the rest of us tin can acquire.
EL | Do you think it's important or topical that nosotros rethink this myth right now? Is there something about our current times that demands it?
MG | We live in a time when the rules about advantages and disadvantages are being rewritten overnight. It used to be a huge advantage in all kinds of businesses to exist the biggest and most established thespian. Now, suddenly, it's non. Netflix — which didn't exist 2 decades ago — is more powerful than some of the old-earth television receiver networks. I feel like everything is up for grabs right at present, which makes the kind of conversation I hope to start with David and Goliath very useful.
EL | InOutliers, you examine highly successful people and the sometimes hidden or unrecognized advantages they had that helped them succeed. Do you view the stories inDavid and Goliath equally the opposite: underdogs, who use their disadvantages to their reward?
MG | Not the contrary, exactly. Merely David and Goliath clearly grows out of Outliers: Information technology's an attempt to accept the lessons of that volume and look at them on a personal level, and with a much greater level of item.
EL | Tin can you explain the concept of "desirable difficulties" and how they inform some people's personalities and become an reward?
MG |"Desirable difficulties" is a lovely term coined past 2 academics at UCLA — psychologists Elizabeth and Roger Bjork. It refers to the idea that certain kinds of obstacles can show advantageous. They have done a ton of work on learning, for example. Sometimes a student does a better task of learning difficult fabric, for example, when the process of learning is made even more difficult. That'southward a desirable difficulty.
The question then is, what kinds of difficulties are desirable? When is an obstacle not an obstacle? I tell the fascinating story in the book of how people during the London Blitz responded to beingness bombed night afterward night by the Germans during the Second World War. Reverse to expectations, most Londoners were not traumatized by the bombing. In fact, most quickly became resistant to it: They realized that they were far more courageous than they had imagined. The difficulty caused by the bombing was — in the mode that information technology afflicted people's attitudes during wartime — desirable.
EL | Much of your writing offers us a window to seeing the globe a bit differently from the truths or perceptions that we may accept for granted. Why practice you remember people have so many subconscious or subconscious misperceptions almost the world?
MG | Oh, wow. A great question. What's that great line from Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer"? "All lies and jest / Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." We're actually great every bit human beings at seeing the globe through our own experience and biases. Much of my piece of work is about trying to imagine situations and experiences through someone else'south eyes — so trying to business relationship for the deviation between our perspective and theirs. The affiliate on Northern Ireland, for instance, is an endeavor to expect at what happened there through the eyes of the Catholic minority — and especially the IRA, which is ordinarily thought of as a terrorist group. It's actually hard to expect at the globe through the optics of a terrorist. But I call up information technology is important for the states to do that, from time to time.
EL | How exercise yous approach writing a book: Exercise yous beginning with a theory and strive to prove it? Or exercise you find a crack in a common perception and utilize that as a wedge to suspension it open?
MG |Usually, I find a powerful idea from psychology or economics or sociology, and look for ways to bring the idea to life. So, for the chapter on parental loss and "remote misses," for example, I became fascinated by the literature on resilience: on the notion that under some circumstances hard times brand us stronger. That idea was the core of the story I tell most Emil Freireich, the remarkable, bright — and damaged — homo who cured childhood leukemia. That remains my favorite chapter in the whole book.
EL | What was your most memorable feel in researching or writing David and Goliath?
MG |For the chapter on the troubles in Northern Ireland, I spent a summer hanging effectually Belfast. It was an eye-opening experience. Hither was a mythical disharmonize — that dragged on for 30 years, engaged ane of the globe's most powerful countries, and claimed countless lives — and much of the conflict took place in a neighborhood so pocket-sized you could walk around it in an hour and a half. It was a sobering reminder that when a group of people is adamant to fight — no thing how seemingly powerless or small they appear — they tin can fight for a long fourth dimension.
EL | What do y'all hope people learn and take abroad from your books?
MG |All my books are virtually the aforementioned thing: They are invitations to think about the world in a slightly dissimilar — and more hopeful — way.
This article originally appeared equally "The Power of the Underdog" in the March 2014 issue of Experience Life.
Page Turners
The Sports Cistron: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance by David Epstein (Current, 2013)
Serena Williams's explosive serve. Cristiano Ronaldo'due south deadly kick. Nature or nurture? The answer, according to Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein, is a resounding "both." If that hints of hedging, information technology isn't. With scientific discipline and studies backing him, Epstein shows that both biology and training are essential for athletic excellence. And 10,000 hours of practice alone — the "magic number for true expertise," as Malcolm Gladwell famously stated in his book Outliers — isn't enough. "It's e'er a hardware and software story," writes Epstein. "Sport skill acquisition does non happen without both specific genes and a specific environment, and oft the genes and the environs must coincide at a specific time." This is an essential, heady read for all athletes. And residuum assured: There is no couch-potato gene either. — Michael Dregni
The Healing Paradox: A Revolutionary Approach to Treating and Curing Physical and Mental Disease by Steven Goldsmith, Md (North Atlantic Books, 2013)
What if we were able to work with affliction to heal it, rather than work against it? What if doctors studied symptom patterns before racing to suppress them with drugs? What if we examined illnesses to see if they might carry their cures within them? These are the kinds of questions psychotherapist Steven Goldsmith asks in his provocative critique of modernistic medicine. Goldsmith promotes "paradoxical treatments," similar homeopathy and vaccination. Such approaches "treat like with similar" — in these cases, using deactivated viruses — to stimulate a torso's own healing capacities and right the deeper causes of disease. (He also discusses treatments of mental illness.) Such paradoxical treatments allow patients to be whole persons, since no function of them is demonized or banished. "Paradox," writes Goldsmith, "implies that there is nothing evil near any function of the states." What could be more healing than that? — Courtney Helgoe
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