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July 16 - July 23, 2025
Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts?
The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.
Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth.
Why do we automatically assume that someone who is smaller or poorer or less skilled is necessarily at a disadvantage?
Part One of David and Goliath is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error.
was the best chance the underdog had of beating Goliath. Logically, every team that comes in as an underdog should play that way, shouldn’t
To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate.
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.
teacher than before, and common sense says that the more attention children get from their teacher, the better their learning experience will be.
if I worked there, I would want to escape. I would be motivated to do something more.”
“My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment,”
they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth.
when the income of parents gets high enough, then parenting starts to be harder again.
Goliath didn’t get what he wanted, because he was too big.
We all assume that being bigger and stronger and richer is always in our best interest.
there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond,
Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great.
Students at “great” schools look at the brilliant students around them, and how do you think they feel?
The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.
What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom.
the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.
No one is failing anyone.
his job was to find students who were tough enough and had enough achievements outside the classroom to be able to survive the stress of being Very Small Fish in Harvard’s Very Large Pond.
It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants.
It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.
What do we mean when we call something a disadvantage?
If they have to overcome a hurdle, they’ll overcome it better when you force them to think a little harder.”
difficulty turned out to be desirable.
It requires that you overcome your insecurity and humiliation. It requires that you focus hard enough
Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Dyslexia—in the best of cases—forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant. It also forces you to do things that you might otherwise never have considered,
Disability helps develop new skills
learning how to deal with the possibility of failure is really good preparation for a career in the business world.
traumatic experiences can have two completely different effects on people: the same event can be profoundly damaging to one group while leaving another better off.
There’s no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism.
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid.
The conquering of fear produces exhilaration.
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.
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid,
She who was the heart And hinge of all our learnings and our loves: She left us destitute and, as we might, Trooping together.
having endured and survived such trauma had a liberating effect.
whether it’s about cancer or the laws of physics,” he said. “They are not confined to the frame. They have the ability to step outside it, because I think the usual frame of childhood didn’t exist for them. It was shattered.”
“real men don’t put their children on the firing line.”
“I wasn’t born that way. This was forced upon me.”
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.
How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.
‘You can slam the door when I come to your house. But I’ll see you on the street. I’ll say hello to you. I’ll learn everything about you.
The difference between the two was that they felt differently about what could be accomplished through the use of power.
Forgive those who trespass against you.
the law made an example of repeat offenders.
