Malcolm Gladwell’s examination of underdogs in David and Goliath suggests that success often depends upon a person’s ability to think outside the box. This is something underdogs are especially good at, since their disadvantages push them to challenge convention out of necessity. To illustrate this point, Gladwell references King Saul, the leader of the Israelites who insisted that David wouldn’t stand a chance against the giant Goliath. Saul doesn’t believe in David, Gladwell upholds, because he “doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.” Gladwell spotlights this unimaginative way of thinking because he claims it’s quite common, since people frequently discount new ways of doing things simply because those ways don’t align with the status quo. On the whole, society is rather set in its ways, and this unfortunately makes it harder for innovators and underdogs to bring about change. If, however, people were able to rid themselves of the notion that the most obvious or common approach is always the best approach, then society as a whole would increase its chances of improvement and success.
Gladwell posits that the people most likely to challenge convention are those with a good reason to abandon traditional tactics. As an example, he tells the story of Vivek Ranadivé, an Indian immigrant living in California who has no experience with basketball. Nevertheless, Ranadivé becomes the coach of his daughter’s team, which is made up of a group of nonathletic girls who don’t have much experience with the sport. Recognizing that the team will be hard-pressed to compete against taller, more athletic opponents, Ranadivé adopts an unpopular strategy known as the full-court press. This involves playing defense at all times, not just under the hoop. Because a team has only five seconds to inbound the ball, Ranadivé instructs his team not to fall back to their own hoop, but to do whatever they can to make it impossible for their opponents to inbound the ball on time. Then, if the ball successfully makes it to one of the other players, Ranadivé’s team continues their defensive efforts, trying to keep the ball from advancing beyond half-court, since the offensive team has only 10 seconds to pass this mark before losing possession. Ranadivé’s team ends up dominating the league, besting teams that are significantly better them simply by adopting this relentless strategy. In this way, they become a perfect example of how challenging convention can lead to success, illustrating that it benefits outsiders and underdogs to adopt alternative tactics to make up for their shortcomings.
Perhaps even more important than this idea, though, is the fact that society at large often criticizes or dismisses approaches that don’t align with the status quo. In response to the overwhelming success of Ranadivé’s team of traditionally unskilled basketball players, for instance, the coaches and parents of other teams in the league are outraged. According to them, Ranadivé’s strategy isn’t “fair.” Even though Ranadivé’s tactic teaches his players to think outside the box, his detractors argue that he’s undermining the purpose of youth basketball leagues, which is to teach young athletes about the sport. Of course, learning the full-court press is learning about basketball, but the approach is unpopular because it’s unconventional. Even at higher levels, only some teams have adopted this strategy, and though it led them to success, the full-court press has never caught on—perhaps because people see it as nothing but a way of compensating for a lack of skill. Rather than focusing on the results it brings about, then, basketball coaches and players frame it as somehow dishonorable, thereby emphasizing the extent to which people cling to convention even when it’s clear that the standard way of doing things is holding them back.
Above all, Gladwell stresses the downfalls of going along with conventional thinking. To do this, he highlights not only the success that can come from thinking outside the box (like Ranadivé and his team), but also the failures that can come from blindly following the status quo. He uses a woman named Caroline Sacks as an example, explaining that she grew up loving and excelling in science. She was at the top of her class and certain she’d become a successful scientist, so she decided to go to Brown, one of the nation’s top schools. Her backup school was the University of Maryland, which is far less prestigious or competitive, so she found the choice to go to Brown quite easy. However, Gladwell argues that this decision cost Sacks dearly because it turned her into a small fish in a big pond. At Maryland, she would have been a big fish in a little pond, which is what she was used to in high school. What she found at Brown, though, is that the students around her grasped the difficult course material much more easily than her, and this ultimately discouraged her so much that, in her sophomore year, she gave up her dream of becoming a scientist, all because of one class. Gladwell goes on to present studies showing that more math and science students from supposedly “mediocre” schools end up succeeding in the field than equally smart (or even smarter) students from Ivy League schools. And yet, students continue to flock to the most prestigious institutions because of the prevailing narrative that all students are better off at the most competitive schools. But Caroline Sacks is sure she’d be a scientist right now if she’d gone to Maryland. Instead, though, she followed the status quo, which wound up hurting her in the end. In turn, readers see that it’s not only wise to challenge preconceived notions, but also risky to unquestioningly accept what society deems valuable.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Convention and the Status Quo ThemeTracker
Convention and the Status Quo Quotes in David and Goliath
Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable. We need a better guide to facing giants […].
On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power. 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. Saul is not alone in making this mistake.
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.
But the question of what any of us would wish on our children is the wrong question, isn’t it? The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma—and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate. 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. Freireich had the courage to think the unthinkable. He experimented on children. He took them through pain no human being should ever have to go through. And he did it in no small part because he understood from his own childhood experience that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.
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.
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.
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.
Is Wilma Derksen more—or less—of a hero than Mike Reynolds? It is tempting to ask that question. But it is not right: Each acted out of the best of intentions and chose a deeply courageous path.
The difference between the two was that they felt differently about what could be accomplished through the use of power. The Derksens fought every instinct they had as parents to strike back because they were unsure of what that could accomplish. They were not convinced of the power of giants.
