There’s an interesting long article in The New Yorker by Malcolm “Blink” Gladwell about how David beats Goliath—that is, how underdogs can use certain strategies to defeat favourites who have much greater power or resources. Bear with me, and you’ll see how this could help you develop success as a writer (a “David” of a task if there ever was one!).
Gladwell cites research by political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft, who analyzed all the wars of the past 200 years and found that in David and Goliath type match-ups (where one side had at least ten times the armed power and population of the other), the underdogs still won 28.5% of the time. Not bad.
Here’s where it gets better: when the underdogs realized that going head-to-head with their more powerful adversaries was not the way to go, and instead adopted an unconventional strategy, their win rate zoomed up to 63.6%.
One example is Lawrence of Arabia, who led Bedouins across one of the harshest deserts in the world (as depicted in one of the best movies of all time) to attack the Turks who never expected an assault from that direction.
Gladwell concludes: “substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.”
Here’s the catch: it’s not easy, and it will offend some people who like to see things done by rules. Your job is to tear up the rule book and find out what works best. As Gladwell points out, that may include doing what is “socially horrifying.”
Equally important is not using that effort to just do the expected things, the same things everybody else is doing. You have to do something different (hey, that’s the name of a great book published by Virgin Books and written by…uh, me).
Part of that “different” is upsetting the routine or expectations of the opponent, as Lawrence did—and even as David did by running toward Goliath.
Another part of the winning pattern for underdogs is “the full-court press”—in the article, one of Gladwell’s main examples is a girls’ basketball team that had little of their opponents’ raw talent but challenged them all over the court, all the time. Gladwell writes, “relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.”
The people who do this kind of thing best are the outsiders—the people who don’t even know the rules and therefore feel no compulsion to stick to them. Next best are those who are able to forget the rules, which is much more difficult.
How could we apply this to success in writing—for example, marketing your books? Well, it points toward considering things like:
• self-publishing or sponsorship
• unusual formats
• unusual marketing hooks
• combining your book with another product
• endorsements from outside the usual channels
• hooking up with a charity for a win-win promotion
• looking for outlets other than book shops
• setting up affiliate sales so many websites promote your book
• and—of course—unrelenting effort in the face of rejection.
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