I have always been a fan of Malcom Gladwell and had this on my list to read. It’s a book that shares various stories of people that had disadvantages. My favorite story was a girls basketball team that didn’t have the skills to play like the other girls so the coach focused on a full court press. His practices focused on conditioning. They became a force in that age group to play full court press and essentially making the highest percentage shot – a layup. It worked for a while until the playoffs where the refs called a lot of fouls on them and eventually lost. The book also talks about people with dyslexia and other disabilities but learning to overcome them to be successful. I enjoyed the reading because I always think about minimizing weaknesses and maximizing strengths which the book really focuses on. Although some people have to really curate their weaknesses at an early age with more time studying or learning, it shows that you can overcome those issues and be successful in the long-term. I would recommend this book to someone that loves understanding strengths and weaknesses as well as hearing stories of incredible people. It’s like mini-autobiographies within the book to learn from.

Here are some of my nuggets:

• Underdogs win all the time so why are we shocked when it happens
• Full court press is legs, not arms – they focused on soccer strategy of run instead of skills
• Basketball team philosophy was to try harder than anyone else
• Press can be beaten but it was their best chance as an underdog
• Most go conventional way when toe to toe instead of finding the underdog way
• Difference in how smart you feel vs how smart you are relative to others
• Best students from mediocre schools were always better than the good students from the best schools
• Concept of desirable difficulties
• Tiger Woods was good at coordination as a kid and loved to practice – dad maximized his strength and taught him golf
• What is learned from necessity is more impressive than learning what is easy
• Ikea founder went against the norm to outsource during Cold War – was bold with his ideas
• More is always not better – inverted U curve