David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell

A Reflection. Week 4

The story directly from Gladwell can be heard here. David and Goliath, Underdogs, Misfits, and The Art of Battling Giants, is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. Gladwell defines “giants” as any powerful opponent, from large armies and strong warriors to disabilities and misfortune. The story of David and Goliath represents the greatness and beauty when the odds are stacked against the perceived weaker individual. For those familiar with Gladwell’s writings, things aren’t what they seem. Being an underdog can change people in ways we fail to appreciate. It creates new opportunities and makes it possible to take a “disadvantage” and accomplish the unthinkable.

Goliath, as well as the masses observing the battle scene, had never thought that a one-on-one battle would be fought in those terms mentioned in the story. Ancient armies had three types of warriors: cavalry (armed men on horseback), infantry (foot soldiers), and artillery (archers and slingers). Slinging took an extraordinary amount of skill and practice just to be useful. It was easier to be an infantry or cavalry than to spend the time required to be effective as a slinger. According to Baruch Halpern, the three types of warriors were very much like rock, paper, scissors, and whereas scissor beats paper, so too does a slinger beat a warrior.

The established norm of one-on-one fights is infantry vs infantry. When Goliath stepped foot into the battle area, he was expecting the same exact type of warrior, but instead was up against the inconceivable.

If you were to sum up all the wars that occurred over the past two hundred years between large and small armies (the larger army being 10x that of the smaller), and guess the odds of the larger army winning, most would say nearly 100%. Ivan Arreguin-Toft did the calculations a few years ago and discovered that the larger army withs 71.5% of the time. Meaning the smaller army (10x smaller) won a third of the time. What if guerrilla tactics are used? The weaker army’s percentage would increase from ~30% to 63.6%. Put it simply, if the United States and Canada went to war, and Canada used unconventional tactics, you would want to side with Canada.

The story of T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, and the Arab revolt against the Turkish army occupying the Arabian Peninsula during the end of the First World War is another example of a “disadvantage” that was clearly misdiagnosed. The Turkish army had an enormous amount of soldiers and fire power. The Bedouin soldier had a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, and forty-five pounds of flour. Lawrence wrote, “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power.” This meant they could travel 110 miles a day across the desert, something a large army cannot do. Lawrence’s band of bedouins had traveled across the desert and attacked the Turks in the middle of the night, killed or captured twelve hundred men while only losing two. The Turks never thought their opponent would be so crazy as to travel the distance of the desert to invade their camps.

There are advantages in having a lot of material resources, and there are also advantages in the absence of material resources. Underdogs win because that absence of material resources tips the balance of power against Goliath.

Gladwell has an interesting style of writing. He is an incredible story teller, and uses that ability to convey his points. Two of the many stories mentioned in this book were particularly interesting. The story of Caroline Sacks and the dyslexic lawyer.

Caroline Sacks was a young girl who had a deep love for science. She spent all her time chasing her curiosity, even if it meant spending the entire day in the dirt observing grass. She had always received high marks during high school, and was accepted into college. She narrowed down her choice between Brown University and the University of Maryland. The choice was obvious, Brown University is Ivy league. Her first semesters were really exciting, but as the classes became harder, things had changed. The students were extremely competitive so much so that they didn’t want to share notes, study habits, and always tried to get a leg up on the other. When she began receiving less than desirable grades (B’s instead of A’s in high school) and noticing other students answer questions in class instead of her, the feeling of inadequacy fell over her.

Caroline Sacks’ knowledge in Organic Chemistry (the class that initiated the feeling of inadequacy) was probably better than 99% of the students in the world. The problem was that Caroline was comparing herself to the students in Brown, who are among the most competitive students in the 99th percentile. She was a little fish in a very large and competitive pond. The very fact she was in that very environment sapped her confidence and made her feel stupid and inadequate, even though in reality, she was very smart.

What Caroline Sacks experienced was called “relative deprivation.” Sociologist Samuel Stouffer coined the term during WWII when he was studying the attitudes and morale of American soldiers. Caroline Sack’s decision to evaluate herself by looking at the students in her organic chemistry class was not a strange or irrational behavior. It is a part and parcel of being a human being. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves. This means that students in elite institutions are going to face a burden that they would not experience in a much less competitive school.

This phenomena applies to other areas of life as well. The suicide rate of happy countries is higher than that of unhappy countries. Depressed people see so many smiling faces around them, and the contract is too great. In applying it to education, relative deprivation is called the “Big Fish-Little Pond Effect.” The more elite a school is, the worse the students feel about their own academic abilities. Confidence and motivation is crucial in education, and that is what happened to Caroline Sacks.

It is why more than half of all American students who start in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) end up switching majors during the first two years. Others are getting it and I am not. Gladwell points to a study where “the students in the bottom third of the Harvard class drop out of math and science just as much as their counterparts in upstate New York. Harvard has the same distribution of science degrees as Hartwick.”

The Big Pond takes really bright students and demoralizes them. The advantages of being in a Big Pond are mixed and their downsides are sometimes ignored. The benefit of being in a Little Pond is that freedom that is given. Its in the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want. Caroline Sacks was asked what major she would be if she went to her second option. “I’d still be in science.”

Gladwell moves on to talk about desirable difficulties. He points out that an extraordinarily high number of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. A few examples of dyslexic entrepreneurs are Richard Branson, British billionaire and founder of Virgin Group; Charles Schwab, founder of brokerage firm; Craig McCaw, cell phone pioneer; John Chambers, CEO of Cisco; David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue; and Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinkos.

David Boies grew up in rural Illinois. When he was young, his mother would read to him and he would memorize what she said because he couldn’t follow what was on the page. He didn’t start reading till the third grade, and had a very hard time reading. After struggling to finish high school, he went on to work in construction. Not having many ambitions as a young adult, his rise to the top of the legal profession is puzzling.

Boise applied to law school, which at the time didn’t require an undergraduate degree. Law schools required heavy reading to get by. Boies discovered that there were summaries of major cases all boiled down the key points of a long supreme court case to a page or two. What Boies excelled at was listening. He would spend his time in class listening and just read the key points of the cases. It worked wonders for him, and he was able to use his listening ability to navigate a witness’s testimony and discover the key points. He even could pick up when a witness’s voice changed or a display of uncertainty or hesitation. Boies was able to become an excel attorney because he was a superb listener.

Boies couldn’t read. He learned to listen because he had no other choice. He was compensating because of his deficiency in reading. He had to adapt and come up with a strategy that allowed him to keep pace with everyone around him. Boies is dyslexic.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a particular mix of the Five Factor Model traits: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Innovators are open to new ideas, conscientious to the fact that they need to be disciplined and persistence, and tend to be on the far end of the agreeableness spectrum: disagreeable. 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”

What dyslexia does is not necessarily make people more open or conscientious(sometimes might), but what the disorder might possibly do is make it a little bit easier to be disagreeable. It might make it so that the individual adapts the world to himself.

Dyslexia in general is a difficult disorder to have. Many people are not able to adapt and use the disadvantage to their benefit. But Dyslexia— in the best of cases— forces you to develop a skill that might otherwise remain dormant. It might make you do things you would have never considered.

That is what David Boies did, as well as Gary Cohn (CEO of Goldman Sachs who is dyslexic) did. That is what successful entrepreneurs with dyslexia do.

David and Goliath is about the underdogs, the misfits. It is about those perceived disadvantages to be actual advantages. Being the alpha male, or the alpha dog, in scenarios isn’t necessarily about being the strongest or the smartest. It is about having the best set of tools/skills for that given environment. David was the alpha dog in that fight.