Over time, I’ve really come to enjoy the writings of Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker and bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. I have my favorite ESPN columnist, Bill Simmons a.k.a. The Sports Guy, to thank for introducing me to Gladwell in several of his columns. Gladwell is one of those authors that makes you use every part of your brain and changes the way you think about anything and everything. He challenges every social norm and constantly wonders why things are the way they are.
image by For example, in a brilliant piece titled “How David Beats Goliath,” Gladwell questions why underdogs in basketball games don’t use the full court press more often considering its high level of success. The full court press evens the playing field more and makes it a game of effort rather than a game of ability. He goes on to analyze underdogs outside of sports, such as Lawrence of Arabia leading the revolt against the Ottoman Army near the end of World War I. T.E. Lawrence was an underdog that broke the rules and found success, discovering unconventional ways to defeat a conventional army. Everyone likes to root for an underdog, especially one that takes the favorite out of their comfort zone and makes them rethink their strategy.
I just finished reading Outliers last month (well, listened to, if you read my recent post on audiobooks). An outlier, according to Gladwell, “is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.” Many assume that success comes from hard work, but Gladwell destroys that assumption by showing how highly successful individuals, like Bill Gates, were not only hard workers but also presented with an extraordinary set of circumstances that others born a few years earlier or later didn’t receive. Gladwell also enjoys researching the uncomfortable, shown by his chapter on plane crashes being a result of the culture pilots grew up in. Gladwell states: “How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from—that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it’s something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years.”
In polling my friends and colleagues, very few people have even heard of Malcolm Gladwell. I highly recommend starting with the underdogs story and even checking out some sports-related banter with Gladwell and Simmons. It’s some of the most thought-provoking and entertaining writing I’ve read in a long time. Let me know what you think!
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