David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell. 

4/5 rating. 275 pages.

Book #59 of 2020. Read August 18, 2020.

This is another wonderful @malcolmgladwell book that discusses underdogs, and the ways that they can defeat the Goliaths in life.

As always in his books, Malcolm does a beautiful job of turning the things we think we know on their heads. Here, he explains what a lifetime of hearing the story of David and Goliath gets wrong: this is not a story about the courage of David against the ferocity of Goliath, but the speed, skill, and understanding David had to realize that he could not match pure strength and win. In order to defeat this giant, he would have to use intelligence and fight a battle that he could win.

This understanding is looked at throughout the book in various situations where we believe that we have to fight fair, but this belief accounts to a huge disadvantage. We need to understand what we are facing, and then go about fixing or making decisions in thought-out, and sometimes unconventional, ways.

Do you want to understand why going to the University of Maryland might be better than going to Brown? Why smaller class sizes don’t really make an impact? Why a full-court press might be the key to winning in basketball? Or how an almost seemingly sadistic doctor cured leukemia? If any of these sound interesting, definitely go read this book and start looking at the challenges you face from new perspectives: as David did with Goliath.

Quotes:

“David fought Goliath not with inferior but (on the contrary) with superior weaponry; and his greatness consisted not in his being willing to go out into battle against someone far stronger than he was. But in his knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger.” – Moshe Dayan, Israeli Minister of Defense

“He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.”

“After sorting through thousands of pages of data on student performance from eighteen separate countries, the economists concluded that there were only two places in the world – Greece and Iceland – where there were ‘nontrivial beneficial effects of reduced class sizes.’”

“The life source of any class is discussion, and that tends to need a certain critical mass to get going. I teach classes right now with students who simply don’t discuss anything, and it is brutal at times. If the numbers get too low, discussion suffers.”

“On Tuesday morning, I make teaching rounds, and sometimes the medical fellows say, ‘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.”

“‘Hell, yeah, we’re going to ride,’ the cussing preacher said and addressed his board. ‘Find you any kind of crack you can to hide in if you’re scared, but I’m walking downtown after this meeting and getting on the bus. I’m not going to look back to see who’s following me.’ His voice deepened into the preacher register. ‘Boys step back,’ he ordered, ‘and men step forward.’” – Pastor Fred Shuttleworth of Birmingham during the civil rights era

“You have to realize, of course, that love doesn’t always save people you want to save.”

“To give you just one statistic, 69 percent of black male high school dropouts born in the late seventies have done time behind bars.”

“Even when pressed, the criminals interviewed by Decker and Wright ‘remained indifferent to threatened sanctions.’ They just weren’t thinking that far ahead.”

“A reasonable assessment of the research to date – with a particular focus on studies conducted in the past decade – is that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society….No consistent body of literature has developed over the last twenty-five to thirty years indicating that harsh sanctions deter.”

“And the effect on a child of having a father sent away to prison is devastating. Some criminals are lousy fathers: abusive, volatile, absent. But many are not. Their earnings – both from crime and legal jobs – help support their families. For a child, losing a father to prison is an undesirable difficulty. Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.”

“Once the criminal has served his time, he returns to his old neighborhood. There’s a good chance he’s been psychologically damaged by his time behind bars. His employment prospects have plummeted. While in prison, he’s lost many of his noncriminal friends and replaced them with fellow-criminal friends. And now he’s back, placing even more strain emotionally and financially on the home that he shattered by leaving in the first place. Incarceration creates collateral damage.”

“One of the little-known facts of my world is that corrections professionals, for the most part, don’t think that what they are doing is going to make things better. They try to run humane prisons, do the best they can. But they watch what’s going on, and they’re right there. They know – they say things like ‘My guards are mistreating people’ or ‘They aren’t going to leave the prison feeling better’ or ‘We don’t give them anything they need.’”

“‘If more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison,’ Clear concluded, ‘the effect on crime starts to reverse.’”

“In the 1980s, California spent 10 percent of its budget on higher education and 3 percent on prisons. After two decades of Three Strikes, the state was spending more than 10 percent of its budget on prisons – $50,000 a year for every man and woman behind bars – while education spending had fallen below 8 percent.”

“We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. But, we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching. If our comrades, whose only fault is to be born in another religion, received the order to let themselves be deported, or even examined, they would disobey the order received, and we would try to hide them as best we could. We have Jews. You’re not getting them.” – Letter from Le Chambon, town in France refusing orders of German occupiers

“Sometimes people ask me, ‘How did you make a decision?’ There was no decision to make. The issue was, Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!”

IG Link.