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David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

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David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

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Highlights & Notes

There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources—and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.

Underdog strategies are hard.

To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.

We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.

He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.

“Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.”

“A parent has to set limits. But that’s one of the most difficult things for immigrants to wealth, because they don’t know what to say when having the excuse of ‘We can’t afford it’ is gone,” Grubman said. “They don’t want to lie and say, ‘We don’t have the money,’ because if you have a teenager, the teenager says, ‘Excuse me. You have a Porsche, and Mom has a Maserati.’ The parents have to learn to switch from ‘No we can’t’ to ‘No we won’t.’”

“No we won’t” get a pony requires a conversation, and the honesty and skill to explain that what is possible is not always what is right.

‘Yes, I can buy that for you. But I choose not to. It’s not consistent with our values.’”

That’s what is called an inverted-U curve. Inverted-U curves are hard to understand. They almost never fail to take us by surprise, and one of the reasons we are so often confused about advantages and disadvantages is that we forget when we are operating in a U-shaped world.2

It is a strange thing, isn’t it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning?

But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries—all Goliaths—too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.

That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.

Conventional wisdom holds that a disadvantage is something that ought to be avoided—that it is a setback or a difficulty that leaves you worse off than you would be otherwise. But that is not always the case.

The idea of desirable difficulty suggests that not all difficulties are negative.

“Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.”

We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, the contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.

father and mother of courage. Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.

Sometimes human survival demands that we commit harm in the cause of some greater good—and, Kogon writes, “the more tender one’s conscience, the more difficult it was to make such decisions.”

Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times—can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David’s opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.

And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.

The [IRA] retaliated by saying that they would shoot soldiers, if Irishmen were shot. The Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force—an extreme and illegal paramilitary unit—quickly joined in, offering to shoot a Catholic in return for every soldier shot by the IRA. The Times quoted a Belfast citizen saying: “Anyone who isn’t confused here doesn’t really understand what is going on.”

Inverted-U curves are all about limits. They illustrate the fact that “more” is not always better; there comes a point, in fact, when the extra resources that the powerful think of as their greatest advantage only serve to make things worse. The inverted-U shape clearly describes the effects of class size, and it clearly applies as well to the connection between parenting and wealth.

But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that’s exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.

Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.

there comes a point where the best-intentioned application of power and authority begins to backfire.

The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.

It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.

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