Before you go too far - if you came here looking for the biblical story about David and Goliath sorry you may not find much here even though the premise is taken from there.
A bit of background on how I laid hands on this book. This was a key "take away" (yeah literally) from our annual corporate conference in Jaipur few months ago. Hence I now have a copy signed by our CEO. We not being a "large" organization (a David) we've always wondered how we can compete with the biggies (the Goliaths). It was quite a timely piece of insight given to us as we started a new year with rather audacious goals.
The general context of this book is that a strength is not necessarily a strength and a weakness is not necessarily so. Malcolm Gladwell being himself goes to a great extent to prove this. Most of it of course does make sense. The text in bold and italics below have been taken verbatim from the book.
To be true to the title of the book, it begins with an analogy based on the biblical David and Goliath story. It talks about how David's agility overcame Goliath's raw size and power. Also, the fact that how Goliath's source of power - his giant size also became the source of his weakness not to be able to adapt to David's attacks.
The next chapter talks about why someone who is lacking something is necessarily not at a disadvantage. He bring about various examples from Lawrence of Arabia to Vivek Ranadive - a silicon valley nerd becomes a basketball coach at his daughter's school. He says "To play by David's rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice." He claims one's disadvantages makes themselves to be desperate and hence to be able to win.
He then talks about parenting which of course struck a very close chord here. He talks about rich vs poor parents and how being rich is not always advantageous beyond a point. He even claims that as the income of parents get high enough parenting actually becomes harder. This probably explains why riches of one generation is not always sustained in the next and then the cycle repeats.
He talks about an interesting concept called "relative deprivation" coined by a sociologist Samuel Stouffer. According to him "we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally - by comparing ourselves to people "in the same boat as ourselves. Our sense of how deprived we are is relative." A very interesting statement was "one of the things about Harvard is that there's just so many smart people there that it's hard to feel smart there".
He moves on to mental disabilities and how it actually works out in favour of them and the people around. He says innovators need to be disagreeable. "They are people willing to take social risks - to do things that others might disapprove of". Maybe this is what is also known as the ability to challenge the status quo?
Another interesting quote - "Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.". Read that twice (or more if needed) but it does make a lot of sense. :-)
He goes on to state many more examples from history such as Martin Luther King's struggles etc where someone literally leveraged on their disadvantages to turn them to into advantages.
Of course it doesn't mean that disadvantages turns into miracles by default for everybody - one has to really work at it and yes it can be overcome.
Happy Reading!!
C
