‘David and Goliath’ by Malcolm Gladwell

Below is the book review I wrote on the bus in July 2014…

To be an underdog can be an advantage and Malcolm Gladwell illustrates the idea through real-life examples. He introduced the concept of the 'gift of opportunity' in an earlier book and this time around, he explains how to turn a handicap into an opportunity and how one accomplish the unthinkable despite the odds. In brief, the book is about the 'advantage of a disadvantage'.

I immediately thought of the Vietnam war. It was a mess for the US army although it was the Goliath of the times. The Vietnamese knew how to fight in the jungle better. I also thought of 17-year-old Michael Chang in that infamous Roland Garros final against Stefan Edberg in 1989 and maybe even more of his underarm serve against Ivan Lendl earlier on in the tournament. And how he managed to win a slam that was not supposed to be his. Remember that? Chang was David in all its splendour. People said it was not fair at the time; in fact, they were almost angry at Chang for not playing a conventional game of tennis...

If there was only one thing to take-away from Gladwell's book, it would be the author saying how much freedom there is in a disadvantage (the 'nothing to lose' attitude) and how much more one can achieve in a small pond compared to a big pond. He specifically used the example of Harvard where the bottom quartile of students (there is always one, even at prestigious schools!) feels demoralised and depressed at their relative underperformance. He goes on describing the large proportion of those failing to get a science degree at such prestigious universities. Of course, the bottom quartile is made of very smart people (they got in in the first place) but only the very best truly enjoy their academic journeys at Ivy League Universities, for they continue to thrive and outperform like they always did.

An extension of the discussion is that early adversity can pay off. This is just a fact-maybe a mere anecdote given the tiny size of the sample-but 12 out of the 44 presidents of the USA had suffered a parental loss in their early years. From Washington to Obama... What's more, Gary Cohn who overcame dyslexia, is now the President of Goldman Sachs.

Now, I have heard somewhere that half of the US Presidents are left-handed; does this mean they overcame this disadvantage as well? Sometimes, it is hard to say what is correlation and what is causation... This would potentially be my only criticism of the book: social sciences are not exact sciences like physics or maths! So it is hard to prove anything, especially with such a small and biased sample (44 US Presidents are definitely not statistically representative of the US population, let alone of the world!).

Malcolm Gladwell also wrote a book called Outliers, so one could think he keeps writing the same book over and over again. But no, this one is different... and quite a useful tool for the outsider that I am, to tell the truth.