Minor Thoughts from me to you

I've been spending time this weekend catching up on some of the articles that I marked for reading over the last couple of months. This morning, I read How David Beats Goliath by Malcom Gladwell.

He tells several stories throughout the article to illustrate his main points: underdogs have to change the rules of the game.

How?

• Change the speed of the game
• Supplant superior ability with superior effort: work harder than the competition.
• Do what is socially horrifying: "challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought".
• Accept the disapproval of the insider's.
• Be prepared for Goliath to insist on unfair rules -- rules that only benefit Goliath.

Goliath doesn't like to lose. He'll stack the deck and insist on playing on terms that are favorable to him. Your job -- whether in sport, business, or battle -- is to exploit every loophole he gives you, to change the rules as much as possible, and to resist the pressure to conform to Goliath's rules.

Here's a few of my favorite quotes from the article:

What happened, Arreguin-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David's winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath's rules, they win, Arreguin-Toft concluded, "even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn't."

... David's victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguin-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful--in terms of armed might and population--as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

... We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability--legs, in Saxe's formulation, can overpower arms--because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

... This is the second half of the insurgent's creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is "socially horrifying"--they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coordination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable--a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment--a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench--to have the audacity to play it that way.

... The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp elite of the time to be socially horrifying. "Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition," the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn't being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

... But let's remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let's remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath's terms, Goliath wins.