I love Malcolm Gladwell and I really love his most recent book 'David and Goliath'
I have read in other places where the book has been slated and Gladwell's technique for making people think differently has been called into question as have the assumptions he has made from the material in the book but Gladwell's concepts are entirely right and in 'David and Goliath' this is particularly brought home with the idea of 'being disagreeable'.
If progress is only ever made by the unreasonable man then we must try to be more unreasonable. Gladwell talks about a Doctor named J Freireich. By Gladwell's account Freireich was a nasty, horrible bit of work but completely and utterly committed to his cause and his results are there for everyone to see. He pioneered a cure for childhood cancer.
My wife is a children's cancer nurse and some of the protocols that Freireich invented can be seen throughout the work that is carried out today. His methods were terrible, some of the things that were reportedly done to children were truly awful and barbaric but who now would go back and undo history and not have a cure for childhood leukaemia? Would we rather watch our children bleed to death?
In Dallas Buyers Club which is the most important film I have seen in the last 10 years Ray Woodruff is a truly horrible and vile man but the difference he makes is colossal and he would only be able to make that difference is he was a horrible and vile man.
It would be nice for us to think that the people who change the world are always lovely, fluffy, cuddly people who are nice to everybody but I am sure a lot of the time that is not the case. It's just not possible to get things done.
So the question is: "Do you want to change the world?"
Leave a comment