Malcolm Gladwell

That being forced to cope with

a highly problematic childhood where they couldn't do the thing they're required to do, which is read.

forced them to learn all kinds of strategies that ended up being more important.

I use that phrase, desirable difficulty, which is a lovely phrase that these two psychologists at UCLA have come up with, to distinguish between the kinds of difficulties that can prove advantageous and undesirable difficulties, which are not the kind of thing that anyone should be expected to recover from or compensate for.

I mean, I got started on this book because in my last book, Outliers, when I was spending a lot of time talking to very successful people, and I was always struck by how often when they accounted for what they had achieved, they began with the difficulties, not with the...

obvious advantages.

And so much of their sense of themselves was something that grew out of some... In some cases, it was some terrible blow that had happened to them that they had managed somehow to navigate.

So there's a chapter here on parental loss.

And on this striking fact that

Very large numbers of American presidents and British prime ministers have lost a parent in childhood.

Way higher than would be expected from the normal population.

Really?

And that's, you know, that's something that... That's just about the worst thing that can happen to a human being.

No kidding.

But look, you know, Bill Clinton.

Right.

Obama.

These are two people who have... But the list is actually extraordinarily long.

And what you understand is that these are... One of the things that distinguishes these people is that there's something about them that took that devastating experience and found a way to come out stronger.

I don't know.