(basketball bounces)
– What’s up Believe Nation it’s Evan.
My one word is believe and I believe
that you have the ability to create something special
that will change the planet.
So to help you on your journey
I started the Mentor Me series.
And the goal here is to try to hang around people
who’ve done a lot more than us,
who’ve achieved massive success,
and hopefully by hanging around them a little bit longer
some of their mindsets, their attitudes, their beliefs,
the way they see the world will seep into us
to help us become the best version of ourselves.
So today we’re going to learn from Malcolm Gladwell
and some of his best advice from David and Goliath.
Mentor me Malcolm.
(inspirational instrumental music)
– I arrived at the idea
for the book because I had done this piece
for The New Yorker some years ago
called How David Beats Goliath about a guy out in California
who coached his daughter’s 12-year-old basketball team
all the way to the National Championships.
Even though they were a group entirely without talent
or skill, and he did it by, for those of you
who are basketball fans, by playing the full court press
every minute of every game.
A really, really, really radical form
of the full court press, the most aggressive form you can.
And I just thought that story was hilarious,
but also really interesting because I loved the way
in which he refused to give up.
So here was, he was a guy who knew nothing
about basketball, coaching a team of girls
without any obvious skills in the area.
And the normal response of people in those situations
is either to say it’s pointless,
and lose by 30 points a game.
Or to try desperately to play by the rules of everyone else,
like to play the way everyone else is playing,
and try and catch up which would be impossible in a season.
And he chose option C which was to hell with it.
Let’s play in this way that’s so deeply subversive that,
you know, the other team isn’t going to know what hit them.
And that story just stayed with me
and I thought it would be really fun
to write a book about those kinds of strategies.
So there’s this really interesting fact
that a very large percentage, a much larger percentage
of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic
than in the general population.
And many of the Richard Branson, Paul Orfalea,
Charles Schwab, John Chambers at Cisco.
I could go on, Craig McCaw, the cellphone pioneer.
The list of these guys are all dyslexic.
Right? David Neeleman at JetBlue.
And if you talk to them they will explain to you
that they don’t think they succeeded
in spite of their disability,
they think they’d succeeded because of it.
For them, and if you want,
I sat down with two dozen of these guys.
I got sort of obsessed at the beginning
of my book, in the middle of my book
with talking to dyslexic entrepreneurs,
and their stories are all the same.
They all look back and will tell you,
“You know if it hadn’t have been for the fact
“that I couldn’t read or read well in second, and third,
“and fourth grade I would never have,”
And they start listing all the things they were forced
to do that proved to be ultimately advantageous.
“I would never have learned how to listen.”
“I would never have been forced,
“in second grade I made friends with the smartest kid
“in the class, and I basically convinced him
“to do my homework for me.”
I can’t tell you how many times I heard
that from these people.
So what are they learning at that age?
They’re learning delegation, they’re learning how
to communicate with other people,
motivate other people, form a team.
Brian Grazer, the Hollywood producer who’s dyslexic,
his whole thing was he would fail
his tests, and he would go
in and he would talk his grade up from a D to a C.
So from the age of this high,
he’s learning negotiation, right?
By the end by the time he hits college he’s brilliant at it.
And then what did he do?
He becomes a Hollywood producer. What is that about?
It’s about negotiation among other things.
And he’s been practicing his entire life.
So there’s this weird thing where he would say,
“As difficult as my dyslexia was,”
and for all of these people they’re childhoods were not fun.
I mean, I interviewed Gary Cohn
who’s the president of Goldman, who’s profoundly dyslexic.
And his childhood just sounds, I mean dark and miserable.
No one thought he was capable of doing schoolwork.
They thought he was, they were amazed
that he could graduate from high school.
Despite that they all look back and they say,
“You know, it was a desirable difficulty.
“I was forced to learn stuff
“I would never even have thought about.”
In order to learn the things that really need to be learned,
we require a certain level of adversity.
The trick is figuring out what
that adversity ought to look like, right?
And that’s like I said something
that can only be decided on a case by case basis.
It’s going to be different for you than it is for me.
It’s not enough to have a great idea, and the focus,
and the conscientiousness to see it to fruition.
You must have the strength, and the resolve,
and the courage to pursue that idea even when the rest
of the world thinks you’re insane, right?
Time and time again if you look at the stories
of extraordinarily important entrepreneurs,
there is almost always a moment when they are the only ones
who believe in the value of what they’re doing.
You know, I tell in my book, my book
David and Goliath, the story of Ingvar Kamprad,
the guy who founds IKEA.
And the crucial moment in the story
of IKEA is when he faces a boycott
from the other furniture manufactures in Sweden
and he’s about to go out of business.
And in desperation he moves his operations
across the Baltic Sea from Sweden
to Poland and sets up shop in Poland.
And that’s what IKEA is.
IKEA is essentially furniture shipped flat made in Poland.
That’s the original elevator pitch for IKEA.
What’s interesting about that is he does it in 1961
at the height of the Cold War.
At a time when East and West, communist world
and free world are closer to outright war
than at any other time in history, a guy living in the West,
Sweden, crosses the pond to Poland,
the Iron Curtain and sets up shop.
You can not imagine what a controversial move that was.
That would be like Walmart opening operations
in North Korea, literally, it’s on that level
of kind of eyebrow raising, “you’ve got to be kidding me,
“who is this guy,” kind of thing.
But he does it, and he persists,
and he turns his back on all those critics.
Why? Because he is a deeply disagreeable person.
Didn’t need people to agree with him, right?
And that’s how he’s able to build IKEA
into this extraordinary runaway success story.
That’s very hard to do, as human beings we are hardwired
to want the approval of our peers.
I retell the story of David and Goliath to start the book.
Because if you look at the story closely
everything you think was a disadvantage about David
actually isn’t and Goliath is not what he looks like.
He looks like this indomitable giant, in fact,
he probably had a medical condition called acromegaly
which is, it’s just sort of a side thing.
– You’re bringing medicine into the Bible dude.
What are you? (laughs)
– It is hilarious because the minute you start digging
into these things you discovery these little pockets
have been arguing about these things for years.
For 50 years endocrinologists have been arguing
about whether Goliath had a tumor on his pituitary gland
which would explain is height.
Because when you have a tumor on your pituitary gland
you overproduce human growth hormone.
– [Host] Right.
– Andre the Giant had this condition.
– Seven-foot-four, a beast.
– Seven-foot-four. – Yeah.
– But one of the side effects is
that it can constrict your optic nerves
and leave you largely with very, very limited eyesight.
So one of the explanations for why Goliath behaved
so strangely and why he doesn’t perceive
that David is not intending to fight him.
I mean, David comes down the mountain,
and he’s got no sword and no armor.
He clearly is not intending to fight a sword fight,
and Goliath just sits there like he’s oblivious.
Well, the answer is, maybe he can only see this far, right?
So it changes everything when you realize, wait a minute,
the giant is weighed down by 100 pounds
of armor and can’t see anything.
He’s like, like this, right?
So, anyway, I do more with that story.
But it’s all about this, trying to get people
to take a step back and understand that we can give up
or feel powerless because we have these empty definitions,
or flawed definitions of advantage.
If you’ve read, you know, Innovator’s Dilemma,
that’s what Innovator’s Dilemma is all about, right?
The disruptive outsider is the one who is incapable
of meeting the marketplace needs
as the market is traditionally defined.
They can’t do it, right, so what do they do?
They try a completely new half-assed approach
which in the beginning doesn’t work, right?
But by that very nature
of trying something completely outside the mainstream
they end up upending the …
Were they any good they would never be forced to do that.
So it’s the same kind of principle.
– Nobody who is talking about your book
in the mainstream media is mentioning the element.
You say that there are three things,
it’s faith, courage, and determination.
– [Malcolm] Yeah.
– Nobody’s talking about faith.
– It’s an odd thing, I mean, this book began as,
I just wanted in the manner of my previous books
to do this kind of, use a lot of social science,
work through theories, tell some stories
about the fact that disadvantages
are often advantageous, and advantages can be.
But by the end of the book I realized
that what I really wanted to talk about was faith,
was about the weapons of the spirit.
I have a chapter where I talk
about this little town in the mountains of France.
During this, it was a bunch of huguenots,
a dissident Protestant sect
in a very Catholic country up in the mountains.
During the Second World War
they decided they were going to harbor
any Jewish refugees that came to their door.
And the Jewish refugees came by the thousands.
They took them in and they told the Nazis,
“We’re taking them in, if you want to come
“and get them we’re not going to give them to you.
“We don’t care what you do to us.”
It’s this extraordinary story,
and if you read into it they had nothing.
They had no resources, no weapons.
They refused to lie, so they weren’t using deceit.
All they had was their faith, and that was enough.
They felt that their faith was every bit the match
for whatever the Nazis threw at them.
And you can not, I don’t care if you are the most dyed
in the wool atheist, you can not read that story
and not come away with a renewed appreciation
for the power that faith gives people.
(airplane whooshes)
– Thank you guys so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed.
I’d love to know what did you learn from this video
that you’re going to immediately apply somehow
to your life or your business.
What was the single most important lesson that you learned?
Leave it down in the comments below,
I’m really curious to find out.
I also want to give a quick shoutout to Dave Gardner.
Dave, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word, and for doing that YouTube review on it.
I really, really, really appreciate the support.
And I’m so glad that you enjoyed the book.
– I’m doing a little review
of Your One Word which is by Evan Carmichael.
– So thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you, and I hope you continue
to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is.
Much love, I’ll see you soon.
(airplane whooshes)
(basketball bounces)
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