Samar’s Reviews > David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants > Status Update

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses.

The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission. You could kill André Trocmé. But in all likelihood, all that would mean is that another André Trocmé would rise in his place.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-03). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants (pp. 273-274). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

“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.

And because he likes to practice so much, he gets even better, and on and on, in a virtuous circle. That’s “capitalization learning”: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-03).

Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally— by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations.

The economist Levin has done some fascinating work, looking at Dutch schoolchildren. He counted how many peers children had in their class—that is, students at a similar level of academic ability— and found that the number of peers had a surprising correlation with academic performance, particularly for struggling students. * In other words, if you are a student—particularly a poor student

And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable. We need a better guide to facing giants—

Gladwell, Malcolm (2013-10-03). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 6). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.