(airplane whooshes) (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)
