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

by Malcolm Gladwell

The Philistines were from Crete. They were a seafaring people who had moved to Palestine and settled along the coast. The Israelites were clustered in the mountains, under the leadership of King Saul.

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.

“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.

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When Saul tries to dress David in armor and give him a sword, he is operating under the same assumption. He assumes David is going to fight Goliath hand to hand. David, however, has

acromegaly—a disease caused by a benign tumor of the pituitary gland. The tumor causes an overproduction of human growth hormone, which would explain Goliath’s extraordinary size. (The tallest person in history, Robert Wadlow, suffered from acromegaly. At his death, he was eight foot eleven inches, and apparently still growing.) And furthermore, one of the

Why was Goliath led onto the valley floor by an attendant? Because the attendant was his visual guide. Why does he move so slowly? Because the world around him is a blur.

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.

Just under a third of the time, the weaker country wins.

refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent.

The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs.

Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead,

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. Part One of David and Goliath is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error.

run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this,

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. 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.

Underdog strategies are hard.

girl learned much more valuable lessons—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged.

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.

something like a quarter million new teachers being hired between 1996 and 2004. Over that same period, per-pupil spending in the United States soared 21 percent—with nearly all of those many tens of billions of new dollars spent on hiring those extra teachers.

“My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment,” he said. “People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth.

There is an important principle that guides our thinking about the relationship between parenting and money—and that principle is that more is not always better. It is hard to be a good parent if you have

Money makes parenting easier until a certain point—when it stops making much of a difference. What is that point? The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets

How do you teach “work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money” to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money?

“Quien no lo tiene, lo hace; y quien lo tiene, lo deshace” (“he who doesn’t have it, does it, and he who has it, misuses it”).

Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Why isn’t there much of a difference between a class of twenty-five students and a class of eighteen students? There’s no question that the latter is easier for the teacher: fewer papers to grade, fewer children to know and follow. But a smaller classroom translates to a better outcome only if teachers change their teaching style when given a lower workload. And what the evidence suggests is that in this midrange, teachers don’t necessarily do that.

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.

The life source of any class is discussion, and

that tends to need a certain critical mass to get going.

If the numbers get too low, discussion suffers.

The school’s average class size? Twelve students. The

It is thinking of the parents of its students, who see things like golf courses and Steinway pianos and small classes as evidence that their $50,000 is well spent. 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

Hotchkiss is not the school it wants to be, because its classes are too small. 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.

paintings. When the art critics mentioned the Impressionists—and there was a small army of art critics in Paris in the 1860s—it was usually to belittle them.

Those who did well would win awards and prestigious fellowships, and at the pinnacle of the profession was the Salon, the most important art exhibition in all of Europe.

the Salon was such an issue for the group of Impressionists was that time and again, the Salon jury turned them down.

The Impressionists had an entirely different idea about what constituted art. They painted everyday life. Their brushstrokes were visible. Their figures were indistinct. To the Salon jury and the crowds thronging the Palais, their work looked amateurish, even shocking.

The Salon was the most important art show in the world. Everyone at the Café Guerbois agreed on that. But the acceptance by the Salon came with a cost: it required creating the kind of art that they did not find meaningful, and they risked being lost in the clutter of other artists’ work. Was it worth it?

Did they want to be a Little Fish in the Big Pond of the Salon or a Big Fish in a Little Pond of their own choosing?

Only paintings that met with the unanimous approval of the jury were hung “on the line,” at eye level. If you were “skyed”—that is, hung closest to the ceiling—it was all but impossible for your painting to be seen.

The Salon was the Big Pond. But it was very hard to be anything at the Salon

Pissarro and Monet disagreed with Manet. They thought it made more sense to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond.

“relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War.

He quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps.

but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.”

Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This