From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian interview with Malcolm Gladwell, in anticipation of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, his latest book of unconventional wisdom:

“The outcome of the original David-and-Goliath clash wasn’t a miracle, he argues: it’s just what happens when the weak refuse to play by rules laid down by the strong. (Sample sentence: ‘Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defence Force, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35m would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of 34m per second – more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him dead or unconscious.’)

‘With each book that passes, I think my personal ideology becomes more explicit … and this one is a very Canadian sort of book,’ says Gladwell, who was born in Fareham, in Hampshire, but grew up in Ontario. ‘It’s Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power. Someone told me – did you know that there’s never been a luxury brand to come from Canada? That’s never happened. That’s such a great fact to have about your home country.’

Difficulties and afflictions, the book shows, frequently foster creativity and resilience. Studies on ‘cognitive disfluency’ have shown that people do better at problem-solving tasks when they’re printed in a hard-to-read font: the extra challenge triggers more effortful engagement. We meet dyslexics whose reading problems forced them to find more efficient ways to master law and finance (one is now a celebrated trial lawyer, another the president of Goldman Sachs); we learn why losing a parent in childhood forges a resilience that frequently spurs achievement in later life, and why you shouldn’t necessarily attend the best university that will have you. (The answer is ‘relative deprivation’: the further you are from being the best at your institution, the more demotivating it is; middling talents perform better at middling establishments.) Conversely, having power can backfire, not least because it tricks the powerful into thinking they don’t need the consent of those over whom they wield it. In a compelling account of the Troubles, Gladwell argues that the British were plagued by a simple error: the belief that their superior resources meant ‘it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them.’ More isn’t always more.”