In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell is particularly interested in how people respond to adversity. He recognizes that everyone reacts to hardship differently, and that it’s not always possible to rise above challenging circumstances. However, he insists that humans are more resilient than they might think. To that end, he upholds that not all negative experiences are incapacitating, instead suggesting that “remote misses”—situations in which people narrowly escape danger—have the power to reinvigorate individuals, giving them a renewed outlook on life. Gladwell also argues that difficult experiences sometimes lead to greatness because people who have faced hardship often feel like they have nothing to lose. With this mentality, they’re less likely to back down from trying something incredible or daring—after all, they only stand to benefit from the possibility of success and are therefore unafraid of failure. By spelling out the unexpected positive outcomes of otherwise undesirable circumstances, then, Gladwell encourages readers to consider the usefulness of hardship—a helpful outlook to adopt, considering that it’s rarely possible to live a life void of misfortune or difficulty.
Although people recognize in an abstract sense that hardship can lead to resilience, Gladwell demonstrates that humans still tend to overestimate the kind of devastation that accompanies adversity. For instance, the British government predicted mass hysteria amongst its citizens during World War II, believing that the entire city of London would be thrown into panic and disarray if Germany bombed it. Thinking this way, they set up psychiatric hospitals outside the city to deal with the psychological fallout of a major bombardment, anticipating that thousands of survivors would flock to these hospitals in search of psychiatric help. When the Germans finally did start bombing the city, though, nobody made use of the hospitals. In fact, the vast majority of Londoners didn’t even leave the city, instead going about their daily lives for the eight months during which bombs continued to fall. For the first two months of the bombardment, Germans dropped bombs on London every single night, but the British population remained largely unfazed, thereby proving that it’s possible to live through experiences that would previously have seemed unimaginable and unbearable.
Wanting to better understand why, exactly, London didn’t descend into panic and chaos during the eight-month bombardment, a psychiatrist studying morale posited that when the bombs fell, the population was divided into three groups: the people who were killed, the “near misses” who were close to the blast but still survived, and the “remote misses” who merely heard the commotion but weren’t directly harmed by the explosion. The incorrect assumption that the British government made was that the “remote misses” would plunge into terror and bereavement. In reality, people who experienced multiple “remote misses” developed a feeling of “invulnerability” and overwhelming joy. One woman who survived a nearby bombing wrote in her diary that surviving made her feel “pure and flawless happiness.” In this way, the Germans’ attack on London had an unintended effect, inadvertently invigorating a large number of Londoners instead of demoralizing them. Taking this as an example, Gladwell makes it clear that hardship doesn’t always have a predictable effect on human beings, who can be surprisingly adaptable and resilient.
Needless to say, there are many different kinds of hardship, not just the kind that affects people in adulthood. With this in mind, Gladwell considers the impact of childhood challenges on a person’s overall life. To do this, he uses a number of examples, ranging from children struggling with dyslexia to those grappling with poverty and a lack of parental support. In every case, the person in question grows up to do incredible things, and though Gladwell acknowledges that this doesn’t mean all children facing hardship are lucky enough to find success or happiness, he suggests that achievement is nevertheless a possible outcome of adversity. For instance, Gladwell uses Gary Cohn—the president of Goldman Sachs—to demonstrate his point, explaining how Cohn effectively conned his way into the stock market business by pretending to have investment experience and strategically creating a situation in which he shared a taxi with an influential person at a Wall Street brokerage firm. Cohn has dyslexia and barely graduated high school, but because of these previous setbacks and difficulties, he knew he had nothing to lose by putting himself out there in a way that few other people would. Bearing this logic in mind, it becomes clear that hardship not only has the ability to help people become adaptable and resilient, but can also encourage them to pursue possibilities they would otherwise never think of as feasible. Accordingly, Gladwell urges readers to avoid seeing adversity as unequivocally bad, instead advocating for the idea that hardship often inspires human growth, resilience, and even prosperity.
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Hardship and Resilience 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.
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?
“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.”
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 to MacCurdy, the Blitz proved that traumatic experiences can have two completely different effects on people: the same event can be profoundly damaging to one group while leaving another better off. […] Too often, we make the same mistake as the British did and jump to the conclusion that there is only one kind of response to something terrible and traumatic. There isn’t. There are two […].
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.
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.
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.
