Meeting Goliath
When I was an undergrad, I knew I wasn’t the smartest or fastest or best student. What I did know was that I trained with a world-champion Thai boxer and he taught me to be tough; tough enough to stay up all day and all night, studying.
Malcolm Gladwell explores this concept, of using effort to supplant weakness in skill, in his latest New Yorker article.
“And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.
What Gladwell is getting at is that you, as an underdog, cannot play by the rules of Goliath — doing so only ensures your loss. What you must do, instead, is exploit weaknesses — lapses in logic — within the context and apply effort in those instances (”look for strengths where things are naturally weak”). Wonderfully, Gladwell describes Rick Pitino’s (yes, the coach) use of frame control to dominate stronger teams.
Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo…
In effect, Gladwell is talking about intelligence. Why, then, does this sound so fresh and new? Because there is a dearth of intelligence in our world.