David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants

by Malcolm Gladwell

the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.

We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is.

That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.”

Underdog strategies are hard.

We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.

77 percent of Americans think that it makes more sense to use taxpayer money to lower class sizes than to raise teachers’ salaries. Do you know how few things 77 percent of Americans agree on?

Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction.

It is a strange thing, isn’t it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning?

the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.

making the questions “disfluent” causes people to “think more deeply about whatever they come across. They’ll use more resources on it. They’ll process more deeply or think more carefully about what’s going on. If they have to overcome a hurdle, they’ll overcome it better when you force them to think a little harder.”

All good parents try to teach their children the art of persuasion, of course. But a normal, well-adjusted child has no need to take those lessons seriously. If you get As in school, you never need to figure out how to negotiate your way to a passing grade, or to look around the room as a nine-year-old and start strategizing about how to make it through the next hour.

“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.”

There’s no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism.

‘This patient is eighty years old. It’s hopeless.’ Absolutely not! It’s challenging, it’s not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.”

the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…When

The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.

For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through.

“It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,”

This is called the “principle of legitimacy,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.

the powerful have to worry about how others think of them—that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.

Incarceration creates collateral damage. In

The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.