BOOK OVERVIEW

Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a pebble and a sling-and ever since, the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants. David's victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn'thave won.

Or should he?

In David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, suffer from a disability, lose a parent, attend a mediocre school, or endure any number of other apparent setbacks.

In the tradition of Gladwell's previous bestsellers-The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw-DAVID AND GOLIATH draws upon history, psychology and powerful story-telling to reshape the way we think of the world around us.

10 BEST QUOTES FROM DAVID AND GOLIATH BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

1. Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.

2. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

3. As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

4. You can’t concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What’s gonna happen if it doesn’t go right?

5. Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.

6. We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.

7. The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.

8. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.

9. Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because the act of facing overwhelming odds, produces greatness and beauty.

10. When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.