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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

As the historian Moshe Garsiel writes, “To the Israelites, this extraordinary spear, with its heavy shaft plus long and heavy iron blade, when hurled by Goliath’s strong arm, seemed capable of piercing any bronze shield and bronze armor together.” Can you see why no Israelite would come forward to fight Goliath? Then David appears. Saul tries to give him his own sword and armor so at least he’ll have a fighting chance. David refuses. “I cannot walk in these,” he says, “for I am unused to it.” Instead he reaches down and picks up five smooth stones, and puts them in his shoulder bag. Then he descends into the valley, carrying his shepherd’s staff. Goliath looks at the boy coming toward him and is insulted. He was expecting to do battle with a seasoned warrior. Instead he sees a shepherd—a boy from one of the lowliest of all professions—who seems to want to use his shepherd’s staff as a cudgel against Goliath’s sword. “Am I a dog,” Goliath says, gesturing at the staff, “that you should come to me with sticks?” What happens next is a matter of legend. David puts one of his stones into the leather pouch of a sling, and he fires at Goliath’s exposed forehead. Goliath falls, stunned. David runs toward him, seizes the giant’s sword, and cuts off his head. “The Philistines saw that their warrior was dead,” the biblical account reads, “and they fled.” 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...

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.

Underdogs win all the time. Why, then, are we so shocked every time a David beats a Goliath? Why do we automatically assume that someone who is smaller or poorer or less skilled is necessarily at a disadvantage?

This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom about one stage in the journey: We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster, and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died. When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks and lost only two men. The Turks simply had not thought that their opponent would be crazy enough to come at them from the desert. Sir Reginald Wingate called Lawrence’s men an “untrained rabble.” He saw the Turks as the overwhelming favorites. But can you see how strange that was? Having lots of soldiers and weapons and resources—as the Turks did—is an advantage. But it makes you immobile and puts you on the defensive. Meanwhile, movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, and courage—which Lawrence’s men had in ...

When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning? And what does it take to be that person who doesn’t accept the conventional order of things as a given—like David, or Lawrence of Arabia, or, for that matter, Vivek Ranadivé and his band of nerdy Silicon Valley girls?

When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time, underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the 202 lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe-to-toe with Goliath the conventional way 152 times—and lost 119 times.

George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in Violent Politics, a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.” It makes no sense, unless you think back to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through snake-infested desert on the back of camels. It is easier and far more satisfying to retreat and compose yourself after every score—and execute perfectly choreographed plays—than to swarm about, arms flailing, and contest every inch of the basketball court. Underdog strategies are hard.

Ranadivé coached a team of girls who had no talent in a sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.

“I wanted to have more freedom. I wanted to aspire to have different things. Money was a tool that I could use for my aspiration and my desires and my drive,” he said. “Nobody taught me that. I learned it. It was kind of like trial and error. I liked the juice of it. I got some self-esteem from it. I felt more control over my life.”

But then that, of course, requires that you have a set of values, and know how to articulate them, and know how to make them plausible to your child—all of which are really difficult things for anyone to do, under any circumstances, and especially if you have a Ferrari in the driveway, a private jet, and a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar.

The life source of any class is discussion, and that tends to need a certain critical mass to get going. I teach classes right now with students who simply don’t discuss anything, and it is brutal at times. If the numbers get too low, discussion suffers. That seems counterintuitive because I would think that the quiet kids who would hesitate to speak in a class of thirty-two would do so more readily in a class of sixteen. But that hasn’t really been my experience. The quiet ones tend to be quiet regardless. And if the class is too small, among the speakers, you don’t have enough breadth of opinion perhaps to get things really going. There is also something hard to pin down about energy level. A very small group tends to lack the sort of energy that comes from the friction between people. And a really, really small class? Beware. I had a class of nine students in grade-twelve Academic French. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? It was a nightmare! You can’t get any kind of conversation or discussion going in the target language. It’s difficult to play games to reinforce vocabulary, grammar skills, et cetera. The momentum just isn’t there.

In narrative painting, the scene should not only be ‘accurate,’ but should also set a morally acceptable tone.

Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations.

What do we mean when we call something a disadvantage? 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. In the next few chapters, I want to explore the idea that there are such things as “desirable difficulties.”

As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention. “If you have a new idea, and it’s disruptive and you’re agreeable, then what are you going to do with that?” says Peterson. “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward.” As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

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.

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 created 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.

The psychologist Stanley J. Rachman, for example, has done things like take a group of people terrified of snakes and then show them a snake. Or take a group of claustrophobics and have them stand in a small metal closet. What he finds is that the actual experience of the thing that was feared is a lot less scary than the person imagined.

In the traditional fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, told to every Western schoolchild, the Tortoise beats the Hare through sheer persistence and effort. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s an appropriate and powerful lesson—but only in a world where the Tortoise and the Hare are playing by the same rules, and where everyone’s effort is rewarded. In a world that isn’t fair—and no one would have called Birmingham in 1963 fair—the Terrapin has to place his relatives at strategic points along the racecourse. The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.

In the next great civil rights showdown in Selma, Alabama, two years later, a photographer from Life magazine put down his camera in order to come to the aid of children being roughed up by police officers. Afterward, King reprimanded him: “The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it. I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.” He needed the picture. In response to the complaints over the use of children, Fred Shuttlesworth said it best: “We got to use what we got.”

But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That’s how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers—and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor. “I still t’ink Ise de fas’est runner in de worl’,” the bewildered Deer complains after a race in which Terrapin has done something that would get him banished from every competition in the world. “Maybe you air,” Terrapin responds, “but I kin head ou off wid sense.”

influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated.

When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave. This is called the “principle of legitimacy,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.

How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.

“Every once in a while during the course of your life, you might have an opportunity to save somebody else’s life,” he went on. “You know, pull ’em out of a burning building, rescue ’em from drowning or some other crazy thing. But how many people get a chance to save six people’s lives each and every day? I mean, I think, I’m so lucky.” He paused, as if he were going back over all that had happened in the nearly twenty years since he made that promise to Kimber. He was remarkably articulate and persuasive. It was obvious how, even in the midst of overwhelming grief, he would have been so compelling all those years ago on the Ray Appleton show. He started up again: “Think about the guy that invented safety belts. Do you know his name? I don’t. I’ve got no clue. But think about how many guys that are safe, or people that are safe, as a result of safety belts or air bags or tamper-proof medicine containers.

“I was taught that there was an alternative way to deal with injustice,” Derksen said. “I was taught it in school. We were taught the history of persecution. We had this picture of martyrdom that went right back to the sixteenth century. The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on.” To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish. The Mennonites believe in the inverted-U curve.

This final lesson about the limits of power is not easy to learn. It requires that those in positions of authority accept that what they thought of as their greatest advantage—the fact that they could search as many homes as they wanted and arrest as many people as they wanted and imprison people for as long as they wanted—has real constraints.

‘How did you make a decision?’ There was no decision to make. The issue was, Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!” In attempting to wipe out the Huguenots, the French created instead a pocket in their own country that was all but impossible to wipe out. As André Trocmé once said, “How could the Nazis ever get to the end of the resources of such a people?”

In 1790, the French Assembly declared that all Catholic clergy, under penalty of imprisonment, had to pledge an oath to the state, making the church subordinate to the government. Those who refused to sign the pledge fled for their lives. Where did many of them go? To the Vivarais Plateau, a community already well practiced in the arts of defiance. The number of dissenters grew. During the First World War, the people of the plateau took in refugees. During the Spanish Civil War, they took in people fleeing the fascist army of General Franco. They took in socialists and communists from Austria and Germany in the early days of the Nazi terror.

The book you have just read has tried to persuade you to think that way. Men, money, and matériel aren’t always the deciding factors in a battle. In fact, what the inverted U-shaped curve tells us is that having too much money and matériel is as debilitating as having too little. Being an underdog—having nothing to lose—opens up possibilities. The Impressionists were better for shunning the Salon. History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized up his opponent long ago in the Valley of Elah. And in a different time and in a very different age, so did Leon Gouré’s great rival, Konrad Kellen.

It was not that the Viet Cong thought they were going to lose. It was that they did not think in terms of winning and losing at all—which was a profoundly different proposition. An enemy who is indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all. In order to understand the true significance of the first answer (that very few thought that the Viet Cong would win), you had to be willing to listen to the second (that very, very few thought the United States would win either)—and to push aside thoughts of the three M’s and appreciate how formidable a shepherd boy can be, even though he looks like the most harmless opponent of all.

In David and Goliath, I’ve tried to persuade you to see the world as Konrad Kellen saw it—to look at the shepherd and the giant and understand where power and advantage really lie. It matters, in a hundred specific and practical ways. It affects the decisions we make as parents, the schools we choose to attend, and the way we fight wars and battle crime. It shapes the way we understand creativity and entrepreneurship and the way the oppressed seek to take on bullies and tyrants. We aren’t very good at confronting these lessons about power. Think of all the extraordinary things that had to happen to Kellen over the course of his life for him to see the truth in Vietnam. Understanding the power of the underdog requires an effort. It requires standing up to conventional wisdom.

The aphorism “It is better to be a big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond” is not perfect advice, but it is not trivial.