Comparing Dubner And Levitt's Think Like A Freak

In the eighth chapter of Dubner and Levitt's book, Think Like a Freak, the authors promote the idea of persuading those who do not wish to be persuaded by telling the audience a good and convincing story. According to Dubner and Levitt, “if [the reader] really want[s] to persuade someone who doesn't wish to be persuaded, [the reader] should tell [his or her audience] a story” (162). A convincing story also needs to be cohesive; the story should have “a daisy chain of events, to show the causes that lead up to a particular situation and the consequences that result from it” (Dubner and Levitt 163). The authors wrote their book by providing the reader with numerous stories; as the book progresses, they use examples of the weighty decisions
I never viewed the issue of quitting as having upsides because I was under the impression that quitters were always losers and failures. Essentially, “quitting [was] not [an option]” for me (Dubner and Levitt 170). As a result, I often “demonized [quitting] and avoided it at all costs—even when it represent[ed] nothing more than a temporary setback” (Dubner and Levitt 176). Moreover, the example the authors use with Morton Thiokol engineer Allan McDonald particularly made an impression, as after reading about McDonald in the book, I conducted research about the 1986 Challenger space shuttle launch. The use of the example sparked my interest in this tragic case where the act of quitting would have saved lives. Had McDonald’s boss listened to McDonald and the other engineers and postponed the launch, seven people could have been alive today. McDonald’s boss had demonized quitting so fiercely that he ignored the possible catastrophic issue McDonald and the other engineers identified and carried out the launch anyway. Interestingly enough, the identified issue was the same cause of the space shuttle explosion; the O-rings did not withstand the unusually cold temperatures in Florida that day, as predicted. This is due to the rubber of the O-rings “harden[ing] and los[ing] its seal”; thus, allowing gases to escape from “the metal cylinders of the rocket booster” and causing the explosion (Kandil). Thereafter, I found out that in 2016, after right after the thirtieth anniversary of the disaster, McDonald donated “papers and other artifacts [regarding the launch] to Chapman University in Orange” in order to “help the public better understand what went wrong with the Challenger” and avoid similar issues in the future (Kandil). Thus, after reading the ninth chapter, I understood the logic behind the authors’ argument about quitting not being as bad as