Malcolm Gladwell: My Hero!

I read the New Yorker magazine. In the May 11, 2009 issue there was an article written by Malcolm Gladwell entitled: How David Beats Goliath.

One of my favorite authors writing about one of my favorite topics--the success of the underdog! In this wonderfully woven article Mr. Gladwell tells the tale of a father who coaches his daughter's basketball team and instead of banishing the less talented and shorter players to the sidelines and giving the most talented, taller players most, if not all, of the court time Vivek Ranadive, the father-coach theorized he would implement two approaches. First he would not shout as he knew from experience his daughter and most other girls do not respond well to shouting and secondly he would coach his girls to play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The girls ended up at the national championships in true David and Goliath fashion

Coach Ranadive's

Redwood City strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The team's entire philosophy is based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

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.

When effort trumps ability the "game" is knocked on it's behind! No one expects the unexpected.

T. E. Lawrence... was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. And David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.

True to form, Gladwell turns conventional wisdom on it's ear stating 71.5% of the time the David's win, not the Goliath's. Folks, it's simple: endurance battles favor the insurgents.

"The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are." --Malcolm Gladwell

So, I'm thinking over the things that he said and continuing to try hard and act more.

"If there's one cultural quality we have, it's that we always see ourselves as the underdog." Bill Gates