In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell argues that people often place too much faith in the things they believe to be advantageous or beneficial. According to Gladwell, certain forms of power can actually work against people who otherwise see themselves as infallible. To illustrate this dynamic, he turns to the titular biblical story of David and Goliath, in which a small shepherd defeats a hulking and intimidating warrior in combat. The giant Goliath, Gladwell argues, meets his end not in spite of his strength and size, but because of these qualities. After all, David’s small stature forces David to think creatively and allows him to quickly realize that, though he doesn’t stand a chance against Goliath up close, he can beat him by strategically using his slingshot from a distance. Goliath, on the other hand, is so confident in his hand-to-hand combat skills and his history as an undefeated warrior that he never even considers the possibility of fighting in any other way. This, in turn, leads to his death. Taking direction from this story, Gladwell focuses on the ways in which so-called advantages can quickly turn into disadvantages. In keeping with this, he ultimately proposes that society would do well to recognize not only the drawbacks of power, but also the benefits of being an underdog.
Early in David and Goliath, Gladwell debunks the idea that conventional forms of power and strength are always beneficial. To do this, he calls attention to the ways in which Goliath finds himself at a severe disadvantage when pitted against a creative thinker like David. Goliath has too much confidence in himself because he has always won hand-to-hand battles in the past. This, however, is simply because he’s used to facing people who challenge him on his own terms. In other words, he has only ever squared off against people who value the same set of strengths as he does and therefore fight according to the same rules. Because Goliath truly is the strongest, most powerful warrior in this regard, he comes to see himself as all but invincible. What he fails to see, though, is that it’s possible for somebody like David—different than him in every way—to use Goliath’s own strengths against him. For instance, Goliath is so musclebound and large that he lacks the kind of swiftness and grace required to protect himself from a nimble opponent like David. Even if he saw David preparing to sling a stone at him, then, he would most likely find himself unable to react quickly enough to dodge the dangerous projectile. What’s more, Gladwell suggests that Goliath’s hulking stature could be the result of a tumor on his pituitary gland, which often hinders a person’s sight, meaning that the very thing that makes Goliath so big is possibly responsible for his inability to see that David is about to send a rock hurtling toward his head. Whether or not this is true, it remains symbolically significant, effectively outlining an important element of Gladwell’s argument: some advantages can, in certain circumstances, quickly turn into disadvantages.
Conversely, Gladwell upholds that disadvantages can also become advantages. He argues that sometimes the very things that set people back end up playing to their favor. He notes that most people think of a disadvantage as “a setback or a difficulty that leaves you worse off than you would be otherwise.” This, however, isn’t categorically true. To prove his point, Gladwell outlines the life stories of three people: David Boies (one of United States’ top trial lawyers), Ingvar Kamprad (the founder of IKEA), and Gary Cohn (the president of Goldman Sachs). All three of these men, Gladwell explains, are dyslexic, and it is partly because they struggled to compensate for their cognitive challenges as children that they ended up becoming so successful, since they were forced to develop skills that not everyone develops. Inherent to Gladwell’s logic is the idea that adversity builds character. Conflict, in other words, leads to growth. And because traits that are typically seen as disadvantageous are what create this kind of conflict in the first place, it follows that disadvantages can ultimately lead to success and triumph. Consequently, Gladwell warns readers against underestimating people who don’t align with society’s narrow-minded understanding of what it means to have an advantage.
A critical element of Gladwell’s argument is that these matters can be highly circumstantial. According to this logic, nothing is wholly beneficial nor wholly detrimental. Rather, some qualities or resources can be advantageous up to a certain point before becoming disadvantageous. To describe this, Gladwell uses what’s known as an inverted-U curve: a graph illustrating a scenario in which one thing has a positive effect on another thing until, at a certain point, it has no effect, and then finally begins to have a negative effect. Gladwell uses family income to outline this idea, explaining that the more money a family has, the easier it is for the parents to raise their children. However, this is only the case for families who make less than $75,000 per year. Parents who make a little bit more than this amount, he says, don’t notice much of a difference, and parents who make significantly more than $75,000 per year actually find parenting increasingly difficult (since it’s harder to say no to children who know their parents could give them whatever they want). Similarly, Goliath’s size isn’t always a disadvantage, nor is David’s size always an advantage—these things depend upon the circumstances. This notion enables Gladwell to demonstrate that traits, qualities, or resources are never categorically advantageous, nor are they always disadvantageous. In turn, he implies that people ought to scrutinize the nature of their own strengths and weaknesses, thereby allowing themselves to more accurately assess when, exactly, they’re at an advantage or disadvantage.
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Advantages and Disadvantages Quotes in David and Goliath
Having lots of soldiers and weapons and resources—as the Turks did—is an advantage. But it makes you immobile and puts you on the defensive. Meanwhile, movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, and courage—which Lawrence’s men had in abundance—allowed them to do the impossible, namely, attack Aqaba from the east, a strategy so audacious that the Turks never saw it coming. There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources—and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.
Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. […The Fordham coach] never used the full-court press the same way again. And the UMass coach, […] who was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids—did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not. Many people in the world of basketball don’t really believe in the press because it’s not perfect: it can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers. Even Ranadivé readily admitted as much. All an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back. […] The press was the best chance the underdog had of beating Goliath. Logically, every team that comes in as an underdog should play that way, shouldn’t they? So why don’t they?
He was successful because he had learned the long and hard way about the value of money and the meaning of work and the joy and fulfillment that come from making your own way in the world. But because of his success, it would be difficult for his children to learn those same lessons.
In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse. The story of the Impressionists suggests a second, parallel problem. We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest.
“I figured, regardless of how much I prepared, there would be kids who had been exposed to stuff I had never even heard of. So I was trying not to be naive about that.” But chemistry was beyond what she had imagined. The students in her class were competitive. “I had a lot of trouble even talking with people from those classes,” she went on. “They didn’t want to share their study habits with me. They didn’t want to talk about ways to better understand the stuff that we were learning, because that might give me a leg up.”
Parents still tell their children to go to the best schools they possibly can, on the grounds that the best schools will allow them to do whatever they wish. We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.
Most of the learning that we do is capitalization learning. It is easy and obvious. If you have a beautiful voice and perfect pitch, it doesn’t take much to get you to join a choir. “Compensation learning,” on the other hand, is really hard. Memorizing what your mother says while she reads to you and then reproducing the words later in such a way that it sounds convincing to all those around you requires that you confront your limitations. It requires that you overcome your insecurity and humiliation. It requires that you focus hard enough to memorize the words, and then have the panache to put on a successful performance. Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. 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.
More important, most of us wouldn’t have jumped in that cab, because we would have worried about the potential social consequences. The Wall Street guy could have seen right through us—and told everyone else on Wall Street that there’s a kid out there posing as an options trader. Where would we be then? We could get tossed out of the cab. We could go home and realize that options trading is over our heads. We could show up on Monday morning and make fools of ourselves. We could get found out, a week or a month later, and get fired. Jumping in the cab was a disagreeable act, and most of us are inclined to be agreeable. But Cohn? He was selling aluminum siding. His mother thought that he would be lucky to end up a truck driver. He had been kicked out of schools and dismissed as an idiot, and, even as an adult, it took him six hours to read twenty-two pages because he had to work his way word by word to make sure he understood what he was reading. He had nothing to lose.
In the traditional fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, told to every Western schoolchild, the Tortoise beats the Hare through sheer persistence and effort. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s an appropriate and powerful lesson—but only in a world where the Tortoise and the Hare are playing by the same rules, and where everyone’s effort is rewarded. In a world that isn’t fair—and no one would have called Birmingham in 1963 fair—the Terrapin has to place his relatives at strategic points along the racecourse. The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.
In Northern Ireland, the British made a simple mistake. They fell into the trap of believing that because they had resources, weapons, soldiers, and experience that dwarfed those of the insurgent elements that they were trying to contain, it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them. General Freeland believed Leites and Wolf when they said that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism.” And Leites and Wolf were wrong.
This is what Jaffe was talking about in Brownsville. The damage she was trying to repair with her hugs and turkeys wasn’t caused by an absence of law and order. It was caused by too much law and order: so many fathers and brothers and cousins in prison that people in the neighborhood had come to see the law as their enemy.
But had the police asked him if he was Beguet, he had already decided to tell the truth: ‘I am not Monsieur Beguet. I am Pastor Andre Trocmé.” He didn’t care. If you are Goliath, how on earth do you defeat someone who thinks like that? You could kill him, of course. But that is simply a variant of the same approach that backfired so spectacularly for the British in Northern Ireland and for the Three Strikes campaign in California. The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission. You could kill Andre Trocmé. But in all likelihood, all that would mean is that another Andre Trocmé would rise in his place.
