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

by Malcolm Gladwell

How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.

Wilingness to participate in the group relates to feeling of being part of the group. But it is not just the hospitality of the group at play, but also one’s own self-perception of their place in the group. Do I fit?

Dyslexia is a problem in the way people hear and manipulate sounds.

Check spelling

because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.

“My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure,” he said. “The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of the upside than the downside. Because we’re so accustomed to the downside. It doesn’t faze us. I’ve thought about it many times, I really have, because it defined who I am. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my dyslexia. I never would have taken that first chance.”

The “risk” of failure has been mitigated through exposure and experience of failure

We are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, 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.

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.

“Badge of Courage”

The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.

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.

Some of the armed robbers also tried not to think about getting caught because such thoughts generated an uncomfortably high level of mental anguish. They believed that the best way to prevent this from happening was to forget about the risk and leave matters to fate. One of them put it this way. “I don’t really trip off getting caught, man, ’cause you’ll just worry yourself like that.” Given that almost all of these offenders perceived themselves not only as being under pressure to obtain money quickly but also as having no lawful means of doing so, this makes sense. Where no viable alternative to crime exists, there clearly is little point in dwelling on the potentially negative consequences of offending. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that the offenders usually preferred to ignore the possible risk and concentrate instead on the anticipated reward: “The way I think about [the threat of being apprehended] is this: I would rather take a chance on getting caught and getting locked up than running around out here broke and not taking a chance on even trying to get no money.”

A fatalist view gives up responsibility of a future because they are not sure there is a future to risk.