Battling Giants Book Report

In the novel, “David and Goliath Underdogs, Misfits, and The Art of Battling Giants,” the Author Malcolm Gladwell uses non-fictional stories to portray his ideals of advantages and disadvantages. Gladwell demonstrates that a first time coach with no experience along with young girls who have never played basketball can make it work toward their advantage in becoming a winning team. Another example Gladwell talks about is an intelligent student named Caroline Sacks. Sacks choose an elite institution and became a big fish in a little pond. Her decision had a big effect on her academic ability to succeed at school. Gladwell is trying to convey that fixed ideas can help us learn from our mistakes and it can be beneficial to others. Just because you …show more content…
The lessons Sacks learned showed us that you must have a balance. Taking on a more elite school provided to be too much for her and this hurt her in the long run. But with disadvantages you have nothing to lose if you fail, so you try new ways to succeed and prevail in the unlikely circumstances. The lesson we learn with this is that most people do not stick with success when they have the disadvantage because they are too eager to try new things. With Ranadive, after another team put their own method to their team Ranadive team playing went back to their old ways and played sloppy offense with no defense. One might use this useful information to maintain a more balanced goal. For instance a student might seek to go to community college before jumping to a big University like Harvard or Yale. Putting yourself in an environment where you are constantly comparing yourself to others just as smart or smarter may hurt you in the long run because this type of behavior leads toe the “relative deprivation” effect. The student may feel stupid compared to other students even though he or she is not. The goal is to have a balance with a good mental state of what lies