I just watched Malcolm Gladwell at GPS on CNN discuss the disabled become successful in his book David and Goliath. The host objected to the examples given saying for example, Richard Branson, who suffers from dyslexia (inability to read) as more of an exemption. Gladwell is criticized for making unfounded claims in his bookBut Gladwell continues to say that the deficiency in one ability forced the individual to develop abilities which one has. They tend to overcompensate. Thus the blind has sharp sense of hearing and touch. (Or may develop bat like capability to detect objects by clicks) Thus lawyer David Boyle, since he could not read had to rely on his memory while taking up law. And this serves him well during the trial because he can remember the testimonies better than the clerks and catches lying witnesses or defendants.
On David and Goliath. Small companies are like David like Microsoft in the beginning. Now it is a lumbering and slow giant, a Goliath. How can big companies become David still? Seems contradictory (or oxymoron?)
It is important for anyone to develop what he has, not what he does not have. Most corporate man who venture into their own seek for things that he does not have like market research or big time ads. He has to learn to live and survive on his own. Thus the disabled are strategic - very strategic because they survive with faculties that are left to them. And maybe begging does not give them dignity.
We thus find a blind like Rose Ambabuyog who was supported though by Ateneo President Fr Ben Nebres to become a magna cum laude Math Major at Ateneo.
Thus there is a joke about a blind who went into a wager with a normal person for a large sum to play 18 holes of golf. However the condition was that: it would take place at night without lights.
But many modern people, steeped in consumerism forget this basic lesson: "Buying things they do not need, with money they do not have, to impress people they do not know"
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