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.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

David, however, has no intention of honoring the rituals of single combat.

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.

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.

The Impressionists had an entirely different idea about what constituted art. They painted everyday life. Their brushstrokes were visible. Their figures were indistinct.

But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest.

Their challenge was “to advance without worrying about opinion.” He was right. Off by themselves, the Impressionists found a new identity.

If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad.

The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.

More than half of all American students who start out in science, technology, and math programs (or STEM, as they are known) drop out after their first or second year.

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.

It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage.

“One of the things you tell a witness when you’re preparing them is take your time,” Boies said. “Even when you don’t need to. Because there will be some times when you need to slow down, and you don’t want to show the examiner by your change of pace that this is something that you need time on.

But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.

But to MacCurdy, the Blitz proved that traumatic experiences can have two completely different effects on people: the same event can be profoundly damaging to one group while leaving another better off.

Of the 573 eminent people for whom Eisenstadt could find reliable biographical information, a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of ten. By age fifteen, 34.5 percent had had at least one parent die, and by the age of twenty, 45 percent.

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.”

African-Americans were outnumbered and overpowered, and the idea embedded in the Brer Rabbit stories was that the weak could compete in even the most lopsided of contests if they were willing to use their wits. Brer Rabbit understood Brer Fox in a way that Brer Fox did not understand himself.

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.

If that many people in your life have served time behind bars, does the law seem fair anymore? Does it seem predictable? Does it seem like you can speak up and be heard?

What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them—that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.

because they did not understand that power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.

The stranger presented his own fate as inevitable. I’m telling you this to let you know what lies ahead. But to the Derksens, what the man was saying was not a prediction but a warning. This is what could lie ahead. They could lose their health and their sanity and each other if they allowed their daughter’s murder to consume them.

An enemy who is indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all.