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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power. The reason King Saul is skeptical of David’s chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.

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.

Inverted-U curves have three parts, and each part follows a different logic.3 There’s the left side, where doing more or having more makes things better. There’s the flat middle, where doing more doesn’t make much of a difference. And there’s the right side, where doing more or having more makes things worse.4

My perfect number is eighteen: that’s enough bodies in the room that no one person needs to feel vulnerable, but everyone can feel important. Eighteen divides handily into groups of two or three or six—all varying degrees of intimacy in and of themselves. With eighteen students, I can always get to each one of them when I need to. Twenty-four is my second favorite number—the extra six bodies make it even more likely that there will be a dissident among them, a rebel or two to challenge the status quo. But the trade-off with twenty-four is that it verges on having the energetic mass of an audience instead of a team. Add six more of them to hit thirty bodies and we’ve weakened the energetic connections so far that even the most charismatic of teachers can’t maintain the magic all the time.

Drop down six from the perfect eighteen bodies and we have the Last Supper. And that’s the problem. Twelve is small enough to fit around the holiday dinner table—too intimate for many high schoolers to protect their autonomy on the days they need to, and too easily dominated by the bombast or bully, either of whom could be the teacher herself. By the time we shrink to six bodies, there is no place to hide at all, and not enough diversity in thought and experience to add the richness that can come from numbers.

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.

What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom.

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

“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.”

He called that period in his life “the ugly years.” His parents didn’t know what to do. “It was probably the most frustrating part of my life, which is saying a lot.” He went on: “Because it wasn’t that I wasn’t trying. I was working really, really hard, and no one understood that part of the equation. They literally thought that I was conscientiously making decisions to be a disruptive kid, to not learn, to hold the class back. You know what it’s like, you’re a six- or seven- or eight-year-old kid, and you’re in a public school setting, and everyone thinks you’re an idiot, so you try to do funny things to try to create some social esteem. You’d try to get up every morning and say, today is going to be better, but after you do that a couple of years, you realize that today is going to be no different than yesterday. And I’m going to have to struggle to get through and I’m going to struggle to survive another day, and we’ll see what happens.”

There is a fascinating passage in an essay by the psychologist Dean Simonton, for example, in which he tries to understand why so many gifted children fail to live up to their early promise. One of the reasons, he concludes, is that they have “inherited an excessive amount of psychological health.” Those who fall short, he says, are children “too conventional, too obedient, too unimaginative, to make the big time with some revolutionary idea.” He goes on: “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.”

Parents are essential. Losing a father or a mother is the most devastating thing that can happen to a child. The psychiatrist Felix Brown has found that prisoners are somewhere between two and three times more likely to have lost a parent in childhood than is the population as a whole. That’s too great a difference to be a coincidence. There are, clearly, an enormous number of direct hits from the absence of a parent.3

Freireich went out and recruited blood donors. The father of one of his patients was a minister, and he brought in twenty members of his congregation. Standard procedure in blood transfusions in the mid-1950s was steel needles, rubber tubes, and glass bottles. But it turned out that platelets stuck to those surfaces. So Freireich had the idea of switching to the brand-new technology of silicon needles and plastic bags. The bags were called sausages. They were enormous. “They were this big,” said Vince DeVita, who was one of Freireich’s medical fellows in those years. He held his hands far apart. “And you have this kid, who is only this big.” He held his hands much closer together. “It was like watering a flowerpot with a fire hose. If you don’t do it right, you put the kids into heart failure. The clinical director of NCI at the time was a guy named Berlin. He saw the [sausage] and said to Jay, ‘You’re insane.’ He told Jay he was going to fire him if he kept doing platelet transfusions.”

In order to have a chance at life—they were told—their child had to be brought savagely and repeatedly to the brink of death.

“Freireich told us to do things,” DeVita said, “that we had been taught were heretical.

But the question of what any of us would wish on our children is the wrong question, isn’t it? The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma—and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.

People used to tell jokes about Birmingham, of the sort that weren’t really jokes: A black man in Chicago wakes up one morning and tells his wife that Jesus had come to him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham. She is horrified: “Did Jesus say He’d go with you?” The husband replies: “He said He’d go as far as Memphis.”

By the time the civil rights crusade came to Birmingham, African-Americans had spent a few hundred years learning how to cope with being outgunned and overmatched. Along the way they had learned a few things about battling giants.

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.

Once, when he was preaching in Petersburg, a small town in Virginia, he showed up at the local whites-only public library with his family and a small entourage in tow, with the intention of getting arrested for breaking the town’s segregation laws. What book did he check out that he could wave in front of the assembled photographers and reporters? A biography of the great hero of the white South, Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general who led the Confederate Army in its battle to defend slavery. That was vintage Wyatt Walker.

Once, in Birmingham, when King was giving a speech, a two-hundred-pound white man charged the stage and began pummeling King with his fists. As King’s aides rushed to defend him, McWhorter writes: They were astounded to watch King become his assailant’s protector. He held him solicitously and, as the audience began singing Movement songs, told him that their cause was just, that violence was self-demeaning, that “we’re going to win.” Then King introduced him to the crowd, as though he were a surprise guest. Roy James, a twenty-four-year-old native New Yorker who lived in an American Nazi Party dormitory in Arlington, Virginia, began to weep in King’s embrace.

Walker liked to call himself a pragmatist. He was once attacked by a “mountain of a man”—six foot six, 260 pounds—when he was standing in front of a courthouse in North Carolina. Walker didn’t embrace his assailant. He got up and came back at him, and each time the man’s blows sent Walker tumbling down the courthouse steps, he picked himself up and came back for more. The third time, Walker recalled later, “he caught me good, knocked me almost senseless. And I went back up a fourth time. By this time, you know, if I’d had my razor I’d have cut him.”

one of the most famous of all trickster tales—the story of Terrapin, a lowly turtle who finds himself in a race with Deer. He hides just by the finish line and places his relatives up and down the course, at strategic intervals, to make it seem like he is running the whole race. Then at the finish line, he emerges just ahead of Deer to claim victory. Deer is completely fooled, since, as Terrapin knows, to Deer, all turtles “am so much like annurrer you can’t tell one from turrer.”

After D Day, King and Walker heard it from all sides. The judge processing the arrested marchers said that the people who “misled those kids” into marching “ought to be put under the jail.” On the floor of Congress, one of Alabama’s congressmen called the use of children “shameful.” The mayor of Birmingham denounced the “irresponsible and unthinking agitators” who were using children as “tools.” Malcolm X—the black activist who was in every way more radical than King—said “real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” The New York Times editorialized that King was engaged in “perilous ventures in brinkmanship” and Time scolded him for using children as “shock troops.” The U.S. attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, warned that “schoolchildren participating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business,” and said, “An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.”

“It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,”

Some religious movements have as their heroes great warriors or prophets. The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle’s ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated “Oh, my Lord, my God” seventy times over.

“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.

What if this was not the exception within the Christian religion but the rule?

Wilma Derksen could have been Mike Reynolds. She could have started her own version of Three Strikes. She chose not to. “It would have been easier in the beginning,” she continued. “But then it would have gotten harder. I think I would have lost Cliff, I think I would have lost my children. In some ways I would be doing to others what he did to Candace.” A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive—and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.

Damn. That’s the gospel right there

In the 1980s, California spent 10 percent of its budget on higher education and 3 percent on prisons. After two decades of Three Strikes, the state was spending more than 10 percent of its budget on prisons—$50,000 a year for every man and woman behind bars—while education spending had fallen below 8 percent.

Lord, have mercy.

The local Huguenot pastor was a man named André Trocmé. He was a pacifist. On the Sunday after France fell to the Germans, Trocmé preached a sermon at the Protestant temple of Le Chambon. “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty,” he said. “Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.”

On the one-year anniversary of the Vichy regime, Pétain ordered towns across the country to ring their church bells at noon on August 1. Trocmé told the church custodian, a woman named Amélie, not to bother. Two summer residents of the town came and complained. “The bell does not belong to the marshal, but to God,” Amélie told them flatly. “It is rung for God—otherwise it is not rung.”

The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.

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 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.

the Plateau of Hospitality. The region had a long history of taking in refugees. 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.