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Valuing Your Uniqueness

May 9th, 2009

The New Yorker is running a story by Malcolm Gladwell called How David Beats Goliath that’s insightful about and relevant to the way we do–and redefine–business today. The point about this article that’s so valuable to me is that it allows and promotes our very individual uniqueness. Modern business–some of which led to our current economic distress–is an incumbent power. As entrepreneurs, at-home workers, creatives and dreamers, and even the unemployed, we need to challenge the plodding, the bulk-processing, “the way things are done” in the marketplace today. We are, therefore, the insurgents. From the article:

Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent. “And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

Coaching moment: In the picture above, the water was the insurgent. In our lives, we are the insurgents: battling against the way our culture does business; also against the way we’ve set up our own lives. If you were to write the story of facing your biggest challenge, living your life to the fullest, and being the most “you” that you can be, what would that story be like? Start with a name for each chapter. Take it out 50 years or more. Next, pick a chapter and just imagine…

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