David and Goliath

Malcolm Gladwell

36 annotations • Sep 2023 – Oct 2023 • data

s005

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.
But there's a second, deeper issue here. Saul and the Israelites think they know who Goliath is. They size him up and jump to conclusions about what they think he is capable of. But they do not really see him. The truth is that Goliath's behavior is puzzling. He is supposed to be a mighty warrior. But he's not acting like one. He comes down to the valley floor accompanied by an attendant—a servant walking before him, carrying a shield. Shield bearers in ancient times often accompanied archers into battle because a soldier using a bow and arrow had no free hand to carry any kind of protection on his own. But why does Goliath, a man calling for sword-on-sword single combat, need to be assisted by a third party carrying an archer's shield?
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.

s007

Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let's say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might than the other. How often do you think the bigger side wins? Most of us, I think, would put that number at close to 100 percent. A tenfold difference is a lot. But the actual answer may surprise you. When the political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft did the calculation a few years ago, what he came up with was 71.5 percent. Just under a third of the time, the weaker country wins.
What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and 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 second deadline in basketball requires a team to advance the ball across midcourt into its opponent's end within ten seconds
Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. David refused to engage Goliath in close quarters, where he would surely lose. He stood well back, using the full valley as his battlefield.
And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn't get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, 'No, no, it's not one, two, three, attitude. It's one, two, three, attitude, hah!'"—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.
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.
All the qualities that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and finely calibrated execution. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable: a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out-of-bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.
T. E. Lawrence could triumph because he was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from the top English military academy. He was an archaeologist by trade who wrote dreamy prose.

s008

The psychologist James Grubman uses the wonderful expression "immigrants to wealth" to describe first-generation millionaires—by which he means that they face the same kinds of challenges in relating to their children that immigrants to any new country face.

s009

The Big Fish–Little Pond option might be scorned by some on the outside, but Small Ponds are welcoming places for those on the inside. They have all of the support that comes from community and friendship—and they are places where innovation and individuality are not frowned upon.
Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called "relative deprivation," a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how black soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts.
The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn't get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers—so you weren't that unhappy.
Which do you think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries.
It's just that the very thing that makes elite schools such wonderful places for those at the top makes them very difficult places for everyone else. This is just another version of what happened to Caroline Sacks. The Big Pond takes really bright students and demoralizes them.
But if you compare the happiness scores of the poor in both countries, Hondurans trump Chileans handily. Why? Because Hondurans care only about how other Hondurans are doing. Graham states, "Because average country income levels do not matter to happiness, but relative distances from the average do, the poor Honduran is happier because their distance from mean income is smaller."

s011

Dyslexia is a problem in the way people hear and manipulate sounds.
Do you know the easiest way to raise people's scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder.
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.
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."

s012

In the early 1960s, a psychologist named Marvin Eisenstadt started a project interviewing "creatives"—innovators and artists and entrepreneurs—looking for patterns and trends. As he was analyzing the responses, he noticed an odd fact. A surprising number had lost a parent in childhood.
In the 1950s, while studying a sample of famous biologists, the science historian Anne Roe had remarked in passing on how many had at least one parent who died while they were young. The same observation was made a few years later in an informal survey of famous poets and writers like Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Swift, Edward Gibbon, and Thackeray. More than half, it turned out, had lost a father or mother before the age of fifteen. The link between career achievement and childhood bereavement was one of those stray facts that no one knew what to do with.
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."
The conquering of fear produces exhilaration. And: The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
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.
The fact of having endured and survived such trauma had a liberating effect. "These are people who are able to break the frame of the known world—what's believed, what's assumed, what's common sense, what's familiar, what everyone takes for granted, whether it's about cancer or the laws of physics," he said. "They are not confined to the frame. They have the ability to step outside it, because I think the usual frame of childhood didn't exist for them. It was shattered."

Foreword

The same pattern can be found among American presidents. Twelve of the first forty-four U.S. presidents—beginning with George Washington and going all the way up to Barack Obama—lost their fathers while they were young.

s013

Trickster tales were wish fulfillments in which slaves dreamed of one day rising above their white masters. But as the historian Lawrence Levine writes, they were also "painfully realistic stories which taught the art of surviving and even triumphing in the face of a hostile environment."
Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times—can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David's opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. 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.

s015

But that was because they were bewildered, not because they were disobedient. Their view of the book was completely blocked by the little girl standing in front of Stella. They had no way of following along. We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella's classroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn't do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.
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.
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.

s016

Webster recently concluded in a massive analysis of every major punishment study: "A reasonable assessment of the research to date—with a particular focus on studies conducted in the past decade—is that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society