Taking on the giants

17 December 2013 - 02:01 By Graham Wood
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now

Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 bestseller, Outliers, started an unexpected trend. People planned their children's births as close to January 1 as possible. Now, with the publication of David & Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, he provides an even greater challenge to parents who hope to mine his work for advice.

In Outliers , Gladwell related a curious phenomenon: in various sports and academic fields, people born at the beginning of the year are more likely to be successful. When they start school, they are slightly older, more mature and physically developed than their classmates. This slight advantage is identified as talent, and the children are trained more rigorously than others.

Gladwell's books are full of odd facts. It's central to what makes them compelling, but also what makes him easily misread. The parents who hoped to provide their children with an advantage by harnessing one of his observations misunderstood him. He's not a self-help guru. Outliers deals with how random and circumstantial success is, not how to succeed.

In David & Goliath , Gladwell goes a step further. He says we think about success incorrectly, misunderstanding the very nature of advantage. His central point is that David is a sure bet as a winner against Goliath. He amasses evidence for his claim that, contrary to our expectations, underdogs win disproportionately often.

"We think of underdog victories as improbable events," he writes.

They're not. For example, a disproportionate number of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic and many of the world's leaders lost a parent at a young age. Do they succeed because of or despite their disadvantages? In some instances, it's undoubtedly because of them. The flipside is that a disproportionate number of these same children end up in jail. And the difficulty and heartache the winners have to endure is an extremely high price to pay.

David & Goliath debunks everything from the perceived advantages of big, well-armed forces in wars to small classes in education and the supposed advantages of going to the best university. Gladwell uses storytelling, interviews, facts, statistics and studies to make his point. His detractors like to criticise his arguments for not being academically sound, but he insists that narrative is not about proof: it's a vehicle for exploring ideas.

But Gladwell is unsure whether success is always good . Often tragedy and suffering are involved in success. Successful people are prepared to be disagreeable and antisocial . But he also gestures towards the moral grey areas that might be necessary.

David & Goliath is a turning point for Gladwell. Not only is it his most accessible book, presumably playing down his exuberant intellectualism in a bid to capture a larger audience.

My guess is that his next book will be about how it's sometimes necessary to go a step further and perpetrate evil to succeed. That would lay down the gauntlet to ambitious parents everywhere.

  • 'David and Goliath' (Penguin), is available from Exclusive Books for R255
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now