Read Online David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Malcolm Gladwell
Tags: Psychology, Social Psychology
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did.”
Sacks sailed through high school at the top of her class. She took a political science course at a nearby college while she was still in high school, as well as a multivariant calculus course at the local community college. She got As in both, as well as an A in every class she took in high school. She got perfect scores on every one of her Advanced Placement pre-college courses.
The summer after her junior year in high school, her father took her on a whirlwind tour of American universities. “I think we looked at five schools in three days,” she says. “It was Wesleyan, Brown, Providence College, Boston College, and Yale. Wesleyan was fun but very small. Yale was cool, but I definitely didn’t fit the vibe.” But Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, won her heart. It is small and exclusive, situated in the middle of a nineteenth-century neighborhood of redbrick Georgian and Colonial buildings on the top of a gently sloping hill. It might be the most beautiful college campus in the United States. She applied to Brown, with the University of Maryland as her backup. A few months later, she got a letter in the mail. She was in.
“I expected that everyone at Brown would be really rich and worldly and knowledgeable,” she says. “Then I got there, and everybody seemed to be just like me—intellectually curious and kind of nervous and excited and not sure whether they’d be able to make friends. It was very reassuring.” The hardest part was choosing which courses to take, because she loved the sound of everything. She ended up in Introductory Chemistry, Spanish, a class called the Evolution of Language, and Botanical Roots of Modern Medicine, which she describes as “sort of half botany class, half looking at uses of indigenous plants as medicine and what kind of chemical theories they are based on.” She was in heaven.
3.
Did Caroline Sacks make the right choice? Most of us would say that she did. When she went on that whirlwind tour with her father, she ranked the colleges she saw, from best to worst. Brown University was number one. The University of Maryland was her backup because it was not in any way as good a school as Brown. Brown is a member of the Ivy League. It has more resources, more academically able students, more prestige, and more accomplished faculty than the University of Maryland. In the rankings of American colleges published every year by the magazine U.S. News & World Report, Brown routinely places among the top ten or twenty colleges in the United States. The University of Maryland finishes much farther back in the pack.
But let’s think about Caroline’s decision in the same way the Impressionists thought about the Salon. What the Impressionists understood, in their endless debates at the Café Guerbois, was that the choice between the Salon and a solo show wasn’t a simple case of a best option and a second-best option. It was a choice between two very different options, each with its own strengths and drawbacks.
The Salon was a lot like an Ivy League school. It was the place where reputations were made. And what made it special was how selective it was. There were roughly three thousand painters of “national reputation” in France in the 1860s, and each submitted two or three of his best works to the Salon, which meant the jury was picking from a small mountain of canvases. Rejection was the norm. Getting in was a feat. “The Salon is the real field of battle,” Manet said. “It’s there that one must take one’s measure.” Of all the Impressionists, he was the one most convinced of the value of the Salon. The art critic Théodore Duret, another of the Guerbois circle, agreed. “You have still one step to take,” Duret wrote to Pissarro in 1874. “That is to succeed in becoming known to the public and accepted by all the dealers and art lovers.…I urge you to exhibit; you must succeed in making a noise, in defying and attracting criticism, coming
Sacks sailed through high school at the top of her class. She took a political science course at a nearby college while she was still in high school, as well as a multivariant calculus course at the local community college. She got As in both, as well as an A in every class she took in high school. She got perfect scores on every one of her Advanced Placement pre-college courses.
The summer after her junior year in high school, her father took her on a whirlwind tour of American universities. “I think we looked at five schools in three days,” she says. “It was Wesleyan, Brown, Providence College, Boston College, and Yale. Wesleyan was fun but very small. Yale was cool, but I definitely didn’t fit the vibe.” But Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, won her heart. It is small and exclusive, situated in the middle of a nineteenth-century neighborhood of redbrick Georgian and Colonial buildings on the top of a gently sloping hill. It might be the most beautiful college campus in the United States. She applied to Brown, with the University of Maryland as her backup. A few months later, she got a letter in the mail. She was in.
“I expected that everyone at Brown would be really rich and worldly and knowledgeable,” she says. “Then I got there, and everybody seemed to be just like me—intellectually curious and kind of nervous and excited and not sure whether they’d be able to make friends. It was very reassuring.” The hardest part was choosing which courses to take, because she loved the sound of everything. She ended up in Introductory Chemistry, Spanish, a class called the Evolution of Language, and Botanical Roots of Modern Medicine, which she describes as “sort of half botany class, half looking at uses of indigenous plants as medicine and what kind of chemical theories they are based on.” She was in heaven.
3.
Did Caroline Sacks make the right choice? Most of us would say that she did. When she went on that whirlwind tour with her father, she ranked the colleges she saw, from best to worst. Brown University was number one. The University of Maryland was her backup because it was not in any way as good a school as Brown. Brown is a member of the Ivy League. It has more resources, more academically able students, more prestige, and more accomplished faculty than the University of Maryland. In the rankings of American colleges published every year by the magazine U.S. News & World Report, Brown routinely places among the top ten or twenty colleges in the United States. The University of Maryland finishes much farther back in the pack.
But let’s think about Caroline’s decision in the same way the Impressionists thought about the Salon. What the Impressionists understood, in their endless debates at the Café Guerbois, was that the choice between the Salon and a solo show wasn’t a simple case of a best option and a second-best option. It was a choice between two very different options, each with its own strengths and drawbacks.
The Salon was a lot like an Ivy League school. It was the place where reputations were made. And what made it special was how selective it was. There were roughly three thousand painters of “national reputation” in France in the 1860s, and each submitted two or three of his best works to the Salon, which meant the jury was picking from a small mountain of canvases. Rejection was the norm. Getting in was a feat. “The Salon is the real field of battle,” Manet said. “It’s there that one must take one’s measure.” Of all the Impressionists, he was the one most convinced of the value of the Salon. The art critic Théodore Duret, another of the Guerbois circle, agreed. “You have still one step to take,” Duret wrote to Pissarro in 1874. “That is to succeed in becoming known to the public and accepted by all the dealers and art lovers.…I urge you to exhibit; you must succeed in making a noise, in defying and attracting criticism, coming
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