David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want. At the time she was applying to college, ...

7. “I was a very enthusiastic student growing up, and I really liked learning and I liked school, and I was good at it,” Stephen ...

in fifth grade as well. I actually think by the time I graduated high school, I had more than enough credits to immediately get ...

Harvard and MIT and chose Harvard. In the first week of school, he walked through Harvard Yard and marveled at his good fortune. ...

world. They were capable of looking at what the rest of us thought of as a great advantage, and seeing it for what it really was ...

to get it more quickly than I did—and you tend to focus on those people and not the ones who are just as lost as you are. “I was ...

couldn’t go on. “You know, there’s something about solving a math problem that’s very satisfying,” Randolph said at one point, a ...

little ruefully. “At least that’s what I tell myself.” At the end of his third year in college, Randolph decided to take the ent ...

written widely on this phenomenon. Here’s another example, this one from Carol Graham’s Happiness Around the World: The Paradox ...

Hondurans are doing. Graham states, “Because average country income levels do not matter to happiness, but relative distances fr ...

may be somewhat different today. 4 This is a crucial enough point that it is worth spelling out in more detail. Chang and his co ...

higher. Every 10-point increase in SAT score causes retention to fall by three percentage points. “Students who attend what they ...

a paper published in a less competitive journal. In other words, their numbers aren’t measuring just how many articles an academ ...

Sander looks at is this. It is harder for a minority student to become a lawyer if he or she goes to a better school. That’s cle ...

middle of the class. I found that in most cases like this, the Fordham student had the edge in the job market. This should not b ...

sense. 7 “Stephen Randolph” is a pseudonym. ...

Part Two ...

The Theory of Desirable Difficulty I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded w ...

the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknes ...

Chapter Four ...