David and Goliath

David and Goliath explains why underdogs win in situations where the odds are stacked unfavorably against them, and how you can do the same.

I’ll be the first to come out of the gate and admit this. Growing up with rich parents makes you weak.

I come from an upper-middle-class family, which in today’s world means I never had to work for anything really. I never learned what it means to be hungry, both physically and psychologically. Learning comes easy to me. I had an easy time in school. So when life suddenly got serious, I was surprised.

I’m sure you have friends like this as well. They know they can forever rely on the wealth their parents generated, so they relax and take life easy – but eventually, this slacker attitude comes at a high price.

If you’re poor and have to work in the family business to earn money for even the most basic of things, this makes you tough and helps you succeed in the real world later in life.

For example, if your parents send you to a private, expensive school, where everyone is the teacher’s darling because classes consist of just 10 people, that won’t really help you learn to navigate an environment with many people, which you’ll face later at work.

Going to a less privileged school will make getting good grades harder, but offer more opportunity to learn from other students and interact with them.

One of my best friends in school was dyslexic. Not only that, because of the local accent in our rural area, he also had a really hard time writing texts in proper German. He’d always get an F on his essays for his horrible spelling and grammar.

But once we were seniors, he started to make up for it with his incredible speaking and presenting skills. He could talk and entertain the entire class about any topic for 45 minutes without a problem after we translated texts together (for example in Latin class). Plus he went on to become a very skilled artist and eventually studied architecture, finishing summa cum laude, top of his class.

Gladwell says disadvantages like such a learning disability can often help us over-develop our skills in other areas, which will make far more than up for it.

When Princeton University changed the font in their intelligence test to a much harder to read style the average score went up from 1.9 to 2.45 out of 3 points. Why? Forcing people to read slower made them think longer and better about the questions, thus increasing their scores.

Remember the baseball and bat question from Thinking Fast and Slow? That’s exactly what this is about.