Nate Robinson’s New Book “Heart Over Height” Reveals How To Deal With Heightism and Discrimination

I found out that Nate Robinson, who is one of the shortest players in the NBA, released his own book about his trials and tribulations recently. It is called “Heart Over Height“. I might have found out about the book from some online news aggregator but it gives a lot insight about how he at just around 5′ 9″ has had to compete and deal with the amount of “hate” and discrimination he has met choosing the career he has and being the size he is at.

The classical American hero story has always been about how the smaller guy managed to triumph over the larger, more dominant opponent and Nate’s story is a good example of it.

This last few days I have been out of town on an outdoors retreat with no laptop so I just picked up the book off of Amazon using the itunes app on my iphone at just $3.50 for Kindle just to see what this average sized man can tell us about how to deal with the internal issues that one might have from always being around people much bigger than him.

The thing is that Nate is not really short. He might be slightly below average when compared to the Average Caucasian Male these days, which is probably around 5′ 10″, but he is not that small. It is his chosen work that puts him in the type of unique situation (which he is forced to deal with internal issues over an aspect on who he is which he can’t control) every day. It is mentioned that his father is 6′ 1″ so he expected to be at least as big as his dad but that didn’t happen.

I do feel bad for the guy, since he didn’t get that 2nd big growth spurt that he hoped for. He has been 5′ 9″ since the age of 15-16.

Then again, we can’t all be 6′ 8″ like Lebron James. For every person who is blessed with the genetic lottery, 9 other person will loss out. It just means that for the people who weren’t so lucky at birth, we are forced to work much harder to get to where we want in life, just to break even with the luckier ones.

I will just quote some study (which everyone uses but can’t find the original study from) which said that for men, for every inch that they increase in height, they will earn about $800 more per year. Of course that is only in the area of life known as professional life. When it comes to our personal lives, it is much, much worst.

Yes, it is NOT FAIR. Yes, there is of course some type of double standard. Yes, there is an unequal distribution of reward to effort ratio when we compare the top 1% to the rest on the bottom, but that there is little that most of us can do about it. We are all sort of waiting for a Superman, who can rise up and save us from ourselves. Most of us feels so powerless to make the sweeping, all pervasive decisions which can really make a huge change in the world. Sure, some people like Kim Jung Un being dictators can change the little nation that they completely rule over but most of us don’t have that type of power.

I do read Reddit and the subreddit groups (like r/short) so I have an idea on what they talk about. This book might really help some people who are on those groups and want some type of light reading material to help get more validation or feedback on the issues they might have on being below average in height. There is not going to be any solutions, but it might be a good motivation and gives some inspiration. (You can read the summary of it here)