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

“Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.”

Throughout the book, the battles against Goliaths are framed not only as winnable for the underdogs, but as actual duties of the underdogs. Struggling against a giant can lead to additional breakthroughs, beauty, and progress in the world. Not fighting simply because the odds look too great can be a way of stifling progress and greatness.

“There is an important lesson in all battles with giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.”

Giants are framed as something to be fought against. Because the goal of any battle is to win, and because giants appear impervious, attacking them is an exercise is spotting vulnerabilities. One of Gladwell’s precepts is that when confronted by a giant, one should not assume that the battle is unwinnable, but rather, to remember that underdogs often win simply because they refused to accept the authority of a giant’s power.

“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.”

Much of Gladwell’s thesis centers on the fact that he believes too much time is spent focusing on the wrong things, or at least, on less effective things. Prestige is visual and conceptual more than it is practical. The title of “elite” should not be given to an institution unless it produces demonstrably elite products or students. Simply asking if there might be downsides to an institution can be enough to raise lines of questioning that can be illuminating. 

“Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.”

Much like the discussions of the value and uses of power in Part 3, the man from Hollywood sees money in comparable manner. To earn wealth is simply to amass it, and that does not necessarily teach the lessons of hard work to the children of rich parents. Hard work from necessity is one of Gladwell’s desirable difficulties, and he demonstrates that children who grow up with money might be at a disadvantage from those who have to struggle to make ends meet.

“Small Ponds are welcoming places for those on the inside. They have all the support that comes from community and friendship.”

A Small Pond reduces the likelihood of anonymity for students. The bonds that are formed through familiarity reduce the competitiveness and self-centeredness that Sacks encountered among the cutthroat students at Brown University. If the instructors in a Small Pond are competent, there is no reason an elite student can’t thrive there, even if the Small Pond lacks the prestige of a larger organization. Feeling welcome can be more important than being at an institution whose appeal is largely due to its influence or public image.

“Innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, ‘agreeableness,’ they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks—to do things that others might disapprove of.”

Gladwell cites several people who made breakthroughs as a result of their indifference to how others thought. This does not mean that they callously ignore the feelings and ideas of others. Rather, a disagreeable innovator is not afraid to try things that might be disagreed with or scoffed at. Disagreeable entrepreneurs perform their own experiments in pursuit of their own goals, and others benefit as a result.

“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.”

Shaw’s use of “unreasonable” is not meant to connote illogicality, naiveté, or foolishness. Someone who is overly reasonable in the sense Shaw is referring to might be incapable of thinking outside of orthodox sets of rules and traditions. After a system has been in place for long enough, innovations rarely spring from dated ways of thinking. Shaw’s unreasonable man keeps looking for new solutions to old problems, even when what appear to be adequate solutions already exist.

“A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.”

One of the characteristics of Gladwell’s underdogs is that they put their ideas into practice. They do this at the risk of mockery, professional ruin, and sometimes, their own lives. If Joanne Jaffe had merely wondered if J-RIP could be a useful program, no one would have benefited from it. If Trocmé had considered whether helping to hide Jews was possible, but had given in to conventional wisdom instead, he would not have saved their lives at Le Chambon.

“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.”

Many of Gladwell’s underdogs are anxious about their circumstances. It is precisely because they continue to fight that they are able to overcome their apprehensiveness. Fear and anxiety can be examples of desirable difficulties if they lead to change and progress. Self-confidence is often a result of being afraid to try something unconventional but doing it anyway in order to achieve a desired result.

“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.”

Colleagues and relatives of Freireich have no memory of a time when he wasn’t brave. Gladwell’s argument is that because he had to become brave at such a young age, Freireich made an indomitable physician who treated even the horrors of a childhood leukemia ward as something to be studied, not to be feared. He was able to work in an environment that was too psychologically difficult for most of his colleagues because of his life of hardship.

“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.”

Not every near miss results in a person of increased fortitude and resilience. However, Gladwell believes that we will inevitably benefit from the presence and actions of people who have been through trauma and overcome it. Freireich was able to save thousands of children’s lives, and Gladwell asserts that his stubbornness and courage may be due to the bleak childhood he overcame. He was fearless because he was practiced in dealing with fear.

“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.”

Like the Huguenots of Chapter 9, African-Americans were already well acquainted with improbable odds. They had no experience not being an underdog, so it was natural for them to think like underdogs. This would lead to Walker’s use of trickery with the photographs and the attack dog that focused the nation’s attention on Birmingham.

“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 is the embodiment of the trickster folk hero whose temperament was so similar to that of Wyatt Walker. Like Brer Rabbit, Walker wasn’t supposed to be able to win. This gave him a liberating sense of not having to obey the rules. His only chance—and the only chance of most like David—is to resort to cleverness and unusual approaches that a giant cannot plan for.

“We’ve got a movement. We’ve got a movement. We’ve had some police brutality.”

Walker is overjoyed when the police use dogs to attack the children at the church protest. This is a stark example of how desperately Walker wanted to win, and how an underdog must often focus solely on the result while avoiding the influence of how he is perceived by the public. Brutality against children was not worthy of celebration but striking a huge public relations blow against Southern oppressions was.

“The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.”

Most like David do not choose the role of the underdog. It is unlikely that the shepherd boy ever would have sought out a giant for single combat unless he saw no other option. This is true of all of the other examples in the book. The innovations and victories of the underdogs are produced by situations that are thrust upon them, not by challenges that they have searched for and embraced.

“Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves ‘rationally.’”

One example of conventional thinking is the assumption that people behave rationally. Gladwell demonstrates in Chapter 7 that this is not always the case. Someone employing unconventional methods may seem irrational to the person who has always done things, or thought, in a certain way. But the results are often what prove whether someone was acting rationally or not.

“If you were in a position of power, you didn’t have to worry about how the lawmakers felt about what you were doing. You just had to be tough enough to make them think twice.”

This quote is from the report “Rebellion and Authority” by Leites and Wolf, Jr. It posits that the powerful do not have to consider the feelings of their subordinates, as long as they are willing to make a show of force. But this is disproven in the examples of the bombed Londoners, Ian Freeland, and the story of André Trocmé. Power could not make people submit, but it could make them more resilient.

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

IRA chief of staff Seán Mac Stíofáin states that the IRA’s existence could not have come about unless the government (which is a stand-in for any Goliath) had been smarter and less forceful. In his view, the government had made it impossible for revolutions not to exist because people could not be controlled indefinitely without believing the legitimacy of the powerful.

“When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.”

Ian Freeland’s experience in Northern Ireland was a missed opportunity for the British Army. Because Freeland focused on being tough—and publicly being seen as tough—he quickly found himself at odds with the population he was there to protect. His behavior showed that he did not care about the people in Lower Falls, which led them to stop caring about him and the efforts of the British Army. This misuse of authority had dire consequences in Ireland during The Troubles of the 1970s.

“You can’t concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, ‘What’s gonna happen if it doesn’t go right?’”

This quote is from various criminals describing their mindset when planning—or in the midst of—committing a crime. Deterring crime through harsher sentences does not account for this type of thinking. But there is a corollary in the example that extends to most of Gladwell’s underdogs: when they began their respective fights, they were not thinking about whether things would go wrong. They simply believed that a different approach was warranted where conventional means had failed.

“[T]hey were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.”

In many of Gladwell’s examples, fear stifles creativity. The Huguenots had been so thoroughly persecuted for centuries by the time of the Blitzkrieg that being seen as fearful was their greatest fear. This courage allowed Trocmé to demonstrate the limits of the Nazis’ power. Once they realized that they could not make him show fear—because he had no fear of them—they did not know how to handle him. They had the power to crush him and his town but did not do so. In the case of Le Chambon, the Goliath of the German empire was defeated by an indifference to power.

“The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.”

If an authority is not respected, it is not legitimate in the eyes of those over whom it exerts power. An illegitimate show of force—such as Ian Freeland in Northern Ireland or the Brownsville police before Jaffe started J-RIP—teaches resistance to power. As long as someone is defiant, even if they cannot show it overtly, that person will continue looking for ways to subvert an authoritarian system. This is why the Germans were unable to make Trocmé and his followers obey, despite their great force.

“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.”

Throughout the book, shepherds can be seen as those who protect and nurture ideas. A shepherd protects what is important and helps it to survive. If certain ideas are lost because they were not helped along by shepherds like the underdogs, all who would benefit from the ideas’ existence suffer. Gladwell’s conclusions go beyond the individual victories of the characters in the book and have implications for human wellbeing on a global scale.