David and Goliath
I make writing software. You might love and rely on products like Draft (hopefully), but 99.9% of the people reading this have used Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Their products are ubiquitous.
My competitors are giants.
I loved Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It inspired people to be persistent. And now, Malcom’s new book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, which comes out today, will inspire a lot of Davids to take on their own Goliaths (I was sent a preview copy).
In the biblical story, David outsmarted the giant using a slingshot to strike Goliath where he was weakest. David was an unlikely hero. He got lucky.
But in Malcolm’s retelling, David’s chances were actually much better than I thought. Goliath was the underdog.
Why then did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at?
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