Gladwell begins by recounting the battle of David and Goliath, an Old Testament story which takes place when the Israelites and the Philistines encounter each other in the valley of Elah. Neither army wants to advance for fear of rendering themselves vulnerable, so the Philistines send Goliath—their largest warrior—to engage in one-on-one combat. At first, none of the Israelites want to face Goliath because he’s so large, but then a small shepherd boy named David volunteers. King Saul tries to dissuade David, but he eventually agrees to send him because nobody else will go. David runs into the valley carrying nothing but his staff and several smooth stones, which he puts in a sling and sends hurtling through the air. The projectile strikes Goliath in the forehead and sends him to the ground, and David uses this opportunity to pick up Goliath’s sword and cut off the giant’s head. Gladwell argues that this story is informative because it not only demonstrates that underdogs can beat “giants,” but that the very qualities that make a person powerful are often the qualities that lead to defeat. Conversely, some disadvantages can actually become beneficial. To illustrate this, he notes that Goliath fails because he’s too large to react to David’s projectile. What’s more, David wins because his smaller size allows him act fast, and the fact that he’s not a trained warrior forces him to think outside the box, which is how he comes up with the idea of using a projectile to slay Goliath.
Setting out to examine the nature of underdog stories, Gladwell turns to Vivek Ranadivé, an Indian immigrant who lives in California and becomes the coach of his daughter Anjali’s basketball team. Vivek Ranadivé has no basketball experience, and the players on his team aren’t particularly talented. However, Ranadivé notices that most basketball teams only play defense underneath their own hoop even though it’s legal to apply defensive pressure as soon as the ball is inbounded. Accordingly, he teaches his team to play the full-court press, a defensive strategy that utilizes the entire court. This tactic makes up for the team’s lack of skills, and it catches other teams by surprise. Using this approach, Ranadivé’s team goes to the national championships, though they’re forced to stop running the play in their final game when a biased referee takes out his frustration on them by calling unfair fouls. Once the team stops playing the full-court press, they lose, but not before demonstrating their ability to compete with much better teams.
Gladwell argues that Ranadivé’s team’s disadvantages contribute to their success, since they would never have played the full-court press if they hadn’t been forced to think of ways to take pressure off of their weaknesses. This suggests that the things people conceive of as advantages and disadvantages aren’t always accurate, since disadvantages can become beneficial in certain circumstances while advantages can become hindrances in others. Gladwell applies this line of thought to education, focusing on Shepaug Valley Middle School in Connecticut, where Teresa DeBrito is the principal. Although most people in the United States assume smaller class sizes lead to better student performance, Gladwell notes that the research on this matter is inconclusive. What’s more, some teachers would rather have large classes than extremely small classes, since it’s difficult to engage students when there are only a few children in the room. For this reason, DeBrito worries that enrollment at Shepaug Valley is shrinking. To illustrate the problem, Gladwell suggests that making classes smaller is beneficial when there are already too many students (around, say, 30 children). If, however, a class is already small, making it smaller will only have a negative impact on the overall environment. The ideal class, then, has a medium amount of students. And yet, prestigious institutions continue to advertise small class sizes, and parents still gravitate toward this model.
The reason people continue to covet small classes, Gladwell upholds, is because society puts too much emphasis on whatever’s considered desirable. For instance, most people believe that Ivy League schools set students up for success no matter what. To explore this idea, Gladwell tells the story of Caroline Sacks, a young woman who excels in school. Sacks wants to be a scientist for her entire life and is accustomed to being the best student in her class. When it comes time to decide where to go to college, she decides on Brown University over the University of Maryland—a seemingly reasonable choice, considering Brown’s prestigious reputation. However, going to Brown is discouraging for Sacks because everyone around her is so smart and competitive. By Sacks’s sophomore year, she is so dispirited by her chemistry courses that she decides to quit studying science. Gladwell notes that this is a very common occurrence at prestigious schools. In fact, research shows that students who want to become scientists would be better off going to “mediocre” schools (where they’d be a “Big Fish in a Small Pond”) than they would be if they went to Ivy League schools (where they’d be a “Small Fish in a Big Pond”), since Ivy League schools are so competitive that many perfectly capable students drop out of the sciences because they’re too discouraged to go on.
The difficulties Sacks faced at Brown were dispiriting, but Gladwell asserts that there are such things as “desirable difficulties,” or challenges that lead to positive outcomes. To illustrate this, he introduces David Boies, a man who struggles in school because he has dyslexia. Because Boies finds it difficult to read, he develops extraordinary listening skills, which later help him excel as a lawyer because he knows how to listen in court for subtleties that other prosecutors overlook. He is now one of the nation’s most sought-after litigators. Going on, Gladwell notes that dyslexia actually functions as a “desirable difficulty” rather often. He tells the story of Gary Cohn, whose dyslexia forces him to become acquainted with failure so that, when it comes time to put himself out there to secure a job as an options trader on Wall Street, he feels he has nothing to lose. Consequently, he goes to great lengths to obtain an interview despite knowing nothing about finance, and eventually lands the job and moves on from there to become the president of Goldman Sachs. In both of these cases, Gladwell adds, there’s something else at play too: a personality trait known as “disagreeability,” which helps a person cast aside any worry about what others might think.
To further demonstrate the unexpected benefits of hardship and the value of “disagreeability,” Gladwell considers the life story of a doctor named Jay Freireich. Freireich grew up in extreme poverty after his father committed suicide when he was just a young boy. Throughout his childhood, he knew all kinds of struggle, so he was especially motivated to succeed when he went to medical school. His first job is on the childhood leukemia ward at the National Cancer Institute—perhaps the most depressing posting a doctor can receive, since childhood leukemia is so relentless and causes immense suffering. Because Freireich feels like he’s been through worse, though, he refuses to get depressed about the apparent hopelessness of his job, and this attitude enables him to keep working to find a cure. To do this, though, he has to try a number of unorthodox tactics that enrage many members of the medical community. Nonetheless, he doesn’t care what other people think because he’s focused on finding a cure. And though some of his methods put children through pain, he figures that since they’re going to die anyway, he might as well do whatever it takes to find a treatment. In this way, he comes up with a new method of treating childhood leukemia, which now has a 90 percent cure rate.
Gladwell turns his attention to the civil rights movement, claiming that one of the reasons activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Baptist minister Wyatt Walker were able to successfully stand up against segregation was that they were used to being underdogs. Moreover, Wyatt Walker understood that sometimes standing up against authority means thinking outside the box and using clever tricks. When trying to attract attention to the Movement, he travels to Birmingham, Alabama in the hopes of getting the racist public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, to do something that will attract outrage across the country. At first Walker is unsuccessful, but he eventually helps stage a large protest made up of schoolchildren, coaxing Bull Connor to send police dogs after them so that reporters take pictures of angry officers sending bloodthirsty dogs at children. This results in a photograph that strikes a nerve in the national discourse about racism and segregation. According to Gladwell, this is a perfect example of how underdogs can use alternative strategies to use their opponents’ power against them.
Still examining the nature of authority, Gladwell pivots to consider the Troubles, the 30-year conflict that took place between Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant communities, as well as the British military. In particular, Gladwell tells the story of an incident that took place in the small Catholic town of Lower Falls, where the British Army (which was biased against the Catholic community) came to search for illegal weapons. This incites rage amongst the residents, who throw stones at the soldiers as the British forces retreat after completing the search. And though the British Army could simply keep going, they turn around because they’ve been ordered to meet resistance with harsh punishment. This leads to a bloody conflict that results in a multi-day curfew, during which residents aren’t allowed to leave even to eat. The curfew only ends when a steady stream of Catholic women from a nearby neighborhood march to Lower Falls, showing solidarity with the residents and forcing the soldiers to leave, since they don’t know how else to respond to the women’s nonviolence. The primary mistake the British made during this encounter, Gladwell upholds, is that they overestimated the effectiveness of their own authority.
With this in mind, Gladwell tells readers about how a Californian man named Mike Reynolds influenced the state to institute a Three Strikes Law after his daughter was murdered by two ex-convicts. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Reynolds sought to address California’s high crime rate, eventually helping pass Three Strikes, which ensured that third-time offenders would go to jail for 25 years to life. Reynolds is quite proud of this, but Gladwell—along with many criminologists—thinks that Three Strikes did more harm than good, since it overcrowded the prison systems and possibly even had a negative effect on the crime rate, though researchers are conflicted about the actual impact of the law. All the same, Gladwell asserts that Reynolds’s efforts to change the penal system were perhaps misdirected, ultimately relying too heavily on the idea that strict laws and merciless authority are capable of bringing about positive change.
In a final examination of the idea that some forms of authority are simply useless when facing underdogs, Gladwell considers the life of a Protestant French pastor named André Trocmé, who openly shelters Jewish people during World War II. Even though the entire town of Le Chambon-sur-Ligne (where Trocmé lives) is forthcoming about helping Jewish people escape persecution, the fascists fail to stop them. Gladwell argues that this is largely because it’s so clear that Trocmé doesn’t care what will happen to him. No matter what, he’s going to stand up for what he believes in. Consequently, the fascists don’t know what to do with him, since killing him would do little to squash what he stands for and the movement he represents. In turn, Gladwell maintains that even the most frightening forms of authority are often rendered powerless by the underdogs who dare to stand up to them.
