David and Goliath
Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
As millions of people would agree, Malcolm Gladwell is an extraordinarily (!) captive writer. This is another one of Gladwell’s gems—packed with riveting stories that challenge our notion of what it means to be an underdog and how, as the sub-title suggests, we can embrace our misfit status as we master the art of battling giants. It’s awesome—especially if you’re looking for a fun, entertaining read that’s packed with wisdom but delivered in a delightful package. Big Ideas include the fact that David SHOULD have won, full-court presses, the inverted U, earning courage and desirable difficulties.
Big Ideas
- Goliath, Meet DavidRetelling the ancient story.
- Full-Court PressSometimes you need to go all in.
- The Inverted UThere are no unmitigated goods.
- Courage Is EARNEDThe London Blitz and you.
- Desirable DifficultiesRethinking challenges.
- Strength and PurposeOf underdogs and misfits.
“David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By ‘giants,’ I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person—famous or unknown, ordinary or brilliant—who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive?
Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate; it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable. We need a better guide to facing giants—and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah.”
~ Malcolm Gladwell from David and Goliath
As millions of people would agree, Malcolm Gladwell is an extraordinarily (!) captive writer.
This is another one of Gladwell’s gems—packed with riveting stories that challenge our notion of what it means to be an underdog and how, as the sub-title suggests, we can embrace our misfit status as we master the art of battling giants.
It’s awesome—especially if you’re looking for a fun, entertaining read that’s packed with wisdom but delivered in a delightful package. (Get the book here.)
Although not a self-help book per se (making it more challenging to create this Note!), I’m excited to pull out a handful of my favorite Big Ideas and shine a light on some wisdom we can apply to our lives today. We’re barely going to scratch the surface but let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFFor some reason, this is a very difficult lesson for us to learn. We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.
Get the Book
Listen to the PodcastGoliath, meet David
“The battle is won miraculously by an underdog who, by all expectations, should not have won at all. This is the way we have told one another the story over many centuries since. It is how the phrase ‘David and Goliath’ has come to be embedded in our language—as a metaphor for improbable victory. And the problem with that version of the events is that almost everything about it is wrong. …
‘Goliath had as much chance against David,’ the historian Robert Dohrenwend writes, ‘as any Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an [opponent] armed with a .45 automatic pistol.’”
Well, that’s an interesting way to re-cast the story, eh? :)
Yep.
And that’s the whole point of the book.
In his wonderful Gladwellian style, we learn that ancient armies had three different kinds of warriors: cavalry (the guys on the horses/chariots) + infantry (foot soldiers with armor + swords, etc.) + projectile warriors (think archers AND, most important for our story, SLINGERS).
The super short story:
Slingers were really deadly. Like: Hit a coin from as far as you can see it/kill as far as 200 yards away lethal.
And, Goliath probably had a serious medical condition—something called “acromegaly” that made him so huge and likely led to vision problems.
Check the book for the full story.
For now, know that the way we tell ourselves the story of David and Goliath is flat out wrong.
As Gladwell concludes the introduction: “What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.
David came running toward Goliath, powered by courage and faith. Goliath was blind to his approach—and then he was down, too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned. All these years, we’ve been telling these kinds of stories wrong. David and Goliath is about getting them right.”
So… David SHOULD have won.
Kinda makes you wonder what other stories we’re telling ourselves that we might want to challenge, eh?
Full-court press
“‘I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,’ Pitino said. He is now the head basketball coach at the University of Louisville, and Louisville has become the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. ‘Then they email me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if their players will last.’ Pitino shook his head. ‘We practice ever day for two hours,’ he went on. The players are moving almost ninety-eight percent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections’—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instructions—’they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.’ Seven seconds! The coaches who come to Louisville sit in the stands and watch that ceaseless activity and despair. To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard. They were not desperate enough. But Ranadivé? Oh, he was desperate. You would think, looking at his girls, that their complete inability to pass and dribble and shoot was their greatest disadvantage. But it wasn’t was it? It was what made their winning strategy possible.”
Part I of the book is called:
THE ADVANTAGES OF DISADVANTAGES (AND THE DISADVANTAGES OF ADVANTAGES)
And Gladwell captures the essence of it brilliantly in the full-court press.
He tells us the story of Vivek Ranadivé. Ranadivé had never played basketball before when he started coaching his twelve-year-old daughter’s basketball team. The girls on the team weren’t particularly tall, nor could they dribble or shoot well. Aside from a couple girls, they really hadn’t played before.
So, he decided to try something different. He decided to run a full-court press ALL.THE.TIME.
If he couldn’t win based on skill, he’d win based on all out effort.
And it worked. His team made it to the national championships. (HAH. So great.)
Two primary morals of this story: Apparent weaknesses can be incredible strengths. AND… Underdog strategies are HARD.
Any thoughts on how you might be able to apply a little full-court press action in your life? :)
P.S. I can’t think of a full-court press and not think of Grant Cardone and his thoughts from The 10x Rule (see Notes).
“We have all heard the fable of the tortoise and the hare. The implied lesson, of course, is that the tortoise wins because he plods along and takes his time, whereas the hare rushes, becomes tired, and misses his opportunity to win. We’re supposed to derive the meaning that we should be tortoises—individuals who approach our goals steadily and slowly. If there was a third player in the fable who had the speed of the hare and the steadfastness of the tortoise, it would smoke them both and have no competition. The fable would then be called Smoked. The suggestion here is to approach your goals like the tortoise and the hare—by attacking them ruthlessly from the beginning and also staying with them throughout the course of the ‘race.’”
I think our friend Smokey would have liked the full-court press. :)
The Inverted U
“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. …
* The psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: ‘Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y. … There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.’”
Gladwell talks about the inverted U in the context of class sizes and the fact that, altho everyone seems to think smaller class sizes are better, the data doesn’t show that.
For our purposes, let’s remember that there are NO unmitigated goods.
Simplified, our inverted U has three primary components: The left, middle and right. The left is too little of a thing which leads to less than awesome outcomes. The middle is just the right amount which leads to optimal results. While the right has too much of the “good” thing and becomes sub-optimal like the left.
We can plot Aristotle’s virtuous mean into this inverted U. For example, too little courage gives you cowardice. Too much? Rashness. The middle is where it’s at.
In this context, Gladwell’s lesson is clear: “We all assume that being bigger and stronger and richer is always in our best interest. Vivek Ranadivé, a shepherd boy named David, and the principal of Shepaug Valley Middle School will tell you that it isn’t.”
Courage is what you earn
“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 at all. Do you see the catastrophic error that the Germans made? They bombed London because they thought that the trauma associated with the Blitz would destroy the courage of the British people. In fact, it did the opposite. It create a city of remote misses, who were more courageous than they had ever been before. The Germans would have been better off not bombing London at all.”
Courage is EARNED.
As Gladwell tells us: “Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough at all.”
Reminds me of the root of the word confidence.
As we’ve discussed, it’s Latin root is con + fidere which means “with INTENSE trust.”
The most intense trust is never conjured.
It’s EARNED.
Gladwell unpacks this wisdom in the context of a fascinating look at the psychological effects of Germany’s decision to bomb London during World War II. Everyone (including the British) thought that the bombing of London would *destroy* the morale of the city and country. They created a bunch of mental hospitals in advance and expected the absolute worst.
And then the fifty-seven consecutive nights (!) of bombings did precisely the OPPOSITE of what they expected.
The “remote misses” (in which bombs struck close but did not result in catastrophic loss) actually emboldened the Londoners and created an unanticipated resilience.
Gladwell cites the work of Canadian psychiatrist J. T. MacCurdy who tells us: “The conquering of fear produces exhilaration.”
And: “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.”
Nietzsche’s admonition that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger comes to mind.
So does David Reynolds.
Talking about the much more mundane challenges of getting yourself to do something you don’t *feel* like doing, Reynolds tells us: “The mature human being goes about doing what needs to be done regardless of whether that person feels great or terrible. Knowing that you are the kind of person with that kind of self- control brings all the satisfaction and confidence you will ever need. Even on days when the satisfaction and confidence just aren’t there, you can get the job done anyway.”
Can you see how past challenges you overcame have made you stronger?
Take a moment and reflect on how much wiser, stronger, more compassionate and powerful you are as a direct result of those challenges.
You’ve earned it.
Desirable difficulty
“The CRT is really hard. But here’s the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise people’s scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder. The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That’s pretty good, though it is well short of the 2.18 that MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read—a 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font—so it looked like this:
1. A bat and ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The average score this time around? 2.45. Suddenly, the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.
That’s strange, isn’t it? Normally we think that we are better at solving problems when they are presented clearly and simply. But here the opposite happened.”
That. Is. Awesome.
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is, as Gladwell describes, already really hard. And, paradoxically, the easiest way to raise people’s scores is to make it just a little bit harder. :)
This captures the essence of the second part of the book focused on “DESIRABLE DIFFICULTY.”
In other words, not *all* difficulty is bad. In fact, some is desirable.
In the case of the CRT example, the less-than-awesome font forces us to slow down and engage more deeply with the question—directly leading to better performance.
Gladwell shares other examples in the book—including uber(!)-successful dyslexics who, because of their challenges reading, developed other skills like an extraordinary ability to listen.
We need to dismiss the notion that ALL difficulties are inherently bad.
Many are, in fact, DESIRABLE.
Personally, I used to wish I grew up in a happy, stable, affluent, well-educated family with a silver spoon in my mouth and optimal DNA in every cell.
(Laughing but I *still* wish that was the case at times! Hah.)
And… Now, I can see that growing up in a lower-middle class, blue collar, super-conservative Catholic family struggling to pay the bills with a father who was an alcoholic (and whose father was an alcoholic who killed himself) was a HUGE blessing.
The resulting challenges that I experience(d) and have overcome/continue to overcome in my own journey ARE THE PRIMARY REASONS I CAN NOW DO WHAT I DO.
Thanks to the wonderful cocktail of my compromised Nature AND Nurture, I was forced to develop a set of skills that I otherwise never would have been forced to create. I also have a deep sense of compassion for the inherent challenges of battling demons along with wisdom on how to overcome them that I can integrate into my work to serve even more profoundly.
Like Ranadivé’s basketball team, I compensated by running full-court presses on my fundamentals (nutrition + rest + exercise + meditation + …) all.the.time. (Hah.)
Back to you.
Can you create an even more compelling, coherent narrative about YOUR life and how your difficulties have proven to be desirable?
That’s a wise thing to do and a cornerstone of a lot of the work we do together.
Strength and purpose
“It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. 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 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.”
David and Goliath.
It’s time to revisit our ideas of strength and weakness.
It’s time to see that underdogs and misfits have advantages in their disadvantages and that we can powerfully turn difficulties into opportunities.
About the author
