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Book: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Quotes of Book: David and Goliath: Underdogs,
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  1. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: "Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y.…There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.
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  2. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.
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  3. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is-and the definition isn't right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. 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.
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  4. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle's ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated "Oh, my Lord, my God" seventy times over.8
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  5. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries-all Goliaths-too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages. They don't, of course.
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  6. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.
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  7. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps {the forerunner of the Air Force} about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps. On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn't get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers-so
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  8. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    though she isn't stupid at all. "Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can't seem to learn to think in this manner." 5. Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called "relative deprivation," a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how black soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts. But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both
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  9. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    Washington in 1965. We instinctively measure advantage in terms of the three M's because men, money, and matériel are the easiest and most obvious ways to make sense of a battle. The only way to appreciate the threat that the Viet Cong posed was to actually listen to what they had to say-to look past the armor and see the man. The book you have just read has tried to persuade you to think that way. Men, money, and matériel aren't always the deciding factors in a battle. In fact, what the inverted U-shaped curve tells us is that having too much money and matériel is as debilitating as having too little. Being an underdog-having nothing to lose-opens up possibilities. The Impressionists were better for shunning the Salon. History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized up his opponent long ago in the Valley of Elah.
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  10. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    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. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
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  11. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.
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  12. Malcolm Gladwell _ David and Goliath: Underdogs,

    That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.
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