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October 3, 2013 - April 23, 2023
David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By “giants,”
The battle is won miraculously by an underdog who, by all expectations, should not have won at all. This is the way we have told one another the story over the many centuries since. It is how the phrase “David and Goliath”
David came running toward Goliath, powered by courage and faith. Goliath was blind to his approach—and then he was down, too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned. All these years, we’ve been telling these kinds of stories wrong. David and Goliath is about getting them right.
Arreguín-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent.
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.
“Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.”
“I wanted to have more freedom. I wanted to aspire to have different things. Money was a tool that I could use for my aspiration and my desires and my drive,”
“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The Italians say, “Dalle stelle alle stalle” (“from stars to stables”). In Spain it’s “Quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance” (“he who doesn’t have it, does it, and he who has it,
We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest. There are many examples of this, but few more telling than the way we think about where to attend university.
“We are beginning to make ourselves a niche,” a hopeful Pissarro wrote to a friend. “We have succeeded as intruders in setting up our little banner in the midst of the crowd.”
Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad.
The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.”
It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage.
It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.
“You start with a problem that you may not know how to solve, but you know there are certain rules you can follow and certain approaches you can take, and often during this process, the intermediate result is more complex than what you started with, and then the final result is simple. And there’s a certain joy in making that journey.”
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
That’s “capitalization learning”: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.
Dyslexics are outsiders as well. They are forced to stand apart from everyone else at school because they can’t do the thing that school requires them to do. Is it possible for that “outsiderness” to give them some kind of advantage down the line? To answer that question, it is worth thinking about the kind of personality that characterizes innovators and entrepreneurs.
Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too, is obvious.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
“My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure,”
And Gary Cohn? It turns out he was a really good trader, and it turns out that learning how to deal with the possibility of failure is really good preparation for a career in the business world. Today he is the president of Goldman Sachs.
There’s no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism.
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.
armor. We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…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.
“Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,” he said blithely. “If they want some books, we will get them. I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.”
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.
“You may fight with your wife,” he went on, his voice filled with the emotion of the memory. “But your daughter is kind of like the princess—she can do no wrong. And for that matter, her dad is the guy who can fix anything, from a broken tricycle to a broken heart. Daddy can fix everything, and when this happened to our daughter, it was something I couldn’t fix. I literally held her hand while she was dying. It’s a very helpless feeling.” At that moment, he made a vow.
“Every once in a while during the course of your life, you might have an opportunity to save somebody else’s life,” he went on. “You know, pull ’em out of a burning building, rescue ’em from drowning or some other crazy thing. But how many people get a chance to save six people’s lives each and every day? I mean, I think, I’m so lucky.”
forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you.
