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- But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. - 1 Samuel 16:7
- “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,” the giant cried out when he saw his opponent approach. Thus began one of history’s most famous battles. The giant’s name was Goliath. The shepherd boy’s name was David.
- David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By “giants,” I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person—famous or unknown, ordinary or brilliant—who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive?
- 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—and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah.
- What happens next is a matter of legend. David puts one of his stones into the leather pouch of a sling, and he fires at Goliath’s exposed forehead. Goliath falls, stunned. David runs toward him, seizes the giant’s sword, and cuts off his head.
- The battle is won miraculously by an underdog who, by all expectations, should not have won at all. This is the way we have told one another the story over the many centuries since. It is how the phrase “David and Goliath” has come to be embedded in our language—as a metaphor for improbable victory. And the problem with that version of the events is that almost everything about it is wrong.
- “Goliath had as much chance against David,” the historian Robert Dohrenwend writes, “as any Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an opponent armed with a .45 automatic pistol.”
- The Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan—the architect of Israel’s astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War—also wrote an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, “David fought Goliath not with inferior but (on the contrary) with superior weaponry; and his greatness consisted not in his being willing to go out into battle against someone far stronger than he was. But in his knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger.”
- Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”
- When the political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft did the calculation a few years ago, what he came up with was 71.5 percent. Just under a third of the time, the weaker country wins.
- Arreguín-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. To put that in perspective, the United States’ population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.
- 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.
- David refused to engage Goliath in close quarters, where he would surely lose. He stood well back, using the full valley as his battlefield. The girls of Redwood City used the same tactic. They defended all ninety-four feet of the basketball court. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those who, like Lawrence’s Bedouin, are “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets
movement, endurance, individual intelligence…courage.”
- Ranadivé said “tired” with a note of approval in his voice. His father was a pilot who was jailed by the Indian government because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of the country’s planes. Ranadivé went to MIT after he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the 1970s, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his money. Ranadivé is slender and fine-boned, with a languorous walk and an air of imperturbability. But none of that should be mistaken for nonchalance. The Ranadivés are relentless.
- The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
- In the world of basketball, there are countless stories like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular.
- Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time, underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the 202 lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe-to-toe with Goliath the conventional way 152 times—and lost 119 times.
- To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard. They were not desperate enough. But Ranadivé? Oh, he was desperate. You would think, looking at his girls, that their complete inability to pass and dribble and shoot was their greatest disadvantage. But it wasn’t, was it? It was what made their winning strategy possible.
- All the qualities that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and finely calibrated execution. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable: a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out-of-bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.
- Why should he care what the world of basketball thought of him? Ranadivé coached a team of girls who had no talent in a sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.
- The summer of his sixteenth year, he went to work at his father’s scrap-metal business. It was hard, physical labor. He was treated like any other employee. “It made me not want to live in Minneapolis,” he said. “It made me never want to depend on working for my father. It was awful. It was dirty. It was hard. It was boring. It was putting scrap metal in barrels. I worked there from May fifteenth through Labor Day. I couldn’t get the dirt off me. I think, looking back, my father wanted me to work there because he knew that if I worked there, I would want to escape. I would be motivated to do something more.”
- He understood money. And he understood money because he felt he had been given a thorough education in its value and function back home on the streets of Minneapolis.
- “I wanted to have more freedom. I wanted to aspire to have different things. Money was a tool that I could use for my aspiration and my desires and my drive,” he said. “Nobody taught me that. I learned it. It was kind of like trial and error. I liked the juice of it. I got some self-esteem from it. I felt more control over my life.”
- Like any parent, he wanted to provide for them, to give them more than he had. But he had created a giant contradiction, and he knew it. 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. Children of multimillionaires in Hollywood do not rake the leaves of their neighbors in Beverly Hills. Their fathers do not wave the electricity bill angrily at them if they leave the lights on. They do not sit in a basketball arena behind a pillar and wonder what it would be like to sit courtside. They live courtside.
- “People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s some place in the middle which probably works best of all.”
- But he wasn’t talking about material comforts. He was a man who had made a great name for himself. One of his brothers had taken over the family scrap-metal business and prospered. Another of his brothers had become a doctor and built a thriving medical practice. His father had produced three sons who were fulfilled and motivated and who had accomplished something for themselves in the world.
- There is an important principle that guides our thinking about the relationship between parenting and money—and that principle is that more is not always better.
- Money makes parenting easier until a certain point—when it stops making much of a difference. What is that point? The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things that make for being a good parent.
- Because when the income of parents gets high enough, then parenting starts to be harder again. For most of us, the values of the world we grew up in are not that different from the world we create for our children. But that’s not true for someone who becomes very wealthy. The psychologist James Grubman uses the wonderful expression “immigrants to wealth” to describe first-generation millionaires—by which he means that they face the same kinds of challenges in relating to their children that immigrants to any new country face. Someone like the Hollywood mogul grew up in the Old Country of the middle class, where scarcity was a great motivator and teacher. His father taught him the meaning of money and the virtues of independence and hard work. But his children live in the New World of riches, where the rules are different and baffling. How do you teach “work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money” to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money? That’s why so many cultures around the world have a proverb to describe the difficulty of raising children in an atmosphere of wealth. In English, the saying is “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The Italians say, “Dalle stelle alle stalle” (“from stars to stables”). In Spain it’s “Quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance” (“he who doesn’t have it, does it, and he who has it, misuses it”). Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction.
- The parents have to learn to switch from ‘No we can’t’ to ‘No we won’t.’” But “no we won’t,” Grubman said, is much harder. “No we can’t” is simple. Sometimes, as a parent, you have to say it only once or twice. It doesn’t take long for the child of a middle-class family to realize that it is pointless to ask for a pony, because a pony simply can’t happen.“No we won’t” get a pony requires a conversation, and the honesty and skill to explain that what is possible is not always what is right. “I’ll walk wealthy parents through the scenario, and they have no idea what to say,” Grubman said. “I have to teach them: ‘Yes, I can buy that for you. But I choose not to. It’s not consistent with our values.’” But then that, of course, requires that you have a set of values, and know how to articulate them, and know how to make them plausible to your child—all of which are really difficult things for anyone to do, under any circumstances, and especially if you have a Ferrari in the driveway, a private jet, and a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar.
- The life source of any class is discussion, and that tends to need a certain critical mass to get going. I teach classes right now with students who simply don’t discuss anything, and it is brutal at times. If the numbers get too low, discussion suffers. That seems counterintuitive because I would think that the quiet kids who would hesitate to speak in a class of thirty-two would do so more readily in a class of sixteen. But that hasn’t really been my experience. The quiet ones tend to be quiet regardless. And if the class is too small, among the speakers, you don’t have enough breadth of opinion perhaps to get things really going. There is also something hard to pin down about energy level. A very small group tends to lack the sort of energy that comes from the friction between people.
- She wanted lots of interesting and diverse voices in her classrooms, and the kind of excitement that comes from a critical mass of students grappling with the same problem. How do you do that in a half-empty room? “The more students you have,” she continued, “the more variety you can have in those discussions.
- But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries—all Goliaths—too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages. They don’t, of course. That’s the lesson of the inverted-U curve. It is good to be bigger and stronger than your opponent. It is not so good to be so big and strong that you are a sitting duck for a rock fired at 150 miles per hour. Goliath didn’t get what he wanted, because he was too big. The man from Hollywood was not the parent he wanted to be, because he was too rich. Hotchkiss is not the school it wants to be, because its classes are too small. We all assume that being bigger and stronger and richer is always in our best interest.
- The psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: “Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y.…There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.”
- “There are in Paris scarcely fifteen art-lovers capable of liking a painting without Salon approval,” Renoir once said. “There are 80,000 who won’t buy so much as a nose from a painter who is not hung at the Salon.”
- 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.
- “I did a lot of crawling around in the grass with a magnifying glass and a sketchbook, following bugs and drawing them,” Sacks says. She is a thoughtful and articulate young woman, with a refreshing honesty and directness. “I was really, really into bugs. And sharks. So for a while I thought I was going to be a veterinarian or an ichthyologist."
- The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all. Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne weighed prestige against visibility, selectivity against freedom, and decided the costs of the Big Pond were too great. Caroline Sacks faced the same choice. She could be a Big Fish at the University of Maryland, or a Little Fish at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. She chose the Salon over the three rooms on Boulevard des Capucines—and she ended up paying a high price.
- But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence.
- Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations. Which do you think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?
- It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school—except, perhaps, those at the very top of the class—are going to face a burden that they would not face in a less competitive atmosphere. Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great.
- The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities. Students who would be at the top of their class at a good school can easily fall to the bottom of a really good school.
- And that feeling—as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be—matters. How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.
- The Harvard Dregs are Little Fish in a Very Big and Scary Pond. The Hartwick All-Stars are Big Fish in a Very Welcoming Small Pond. What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom.
- According to research done by Mitchell Chang of the University of California, the likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree—all things being equal—rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university’s average SAT score.4 The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science.
- So what did they find? That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools. But why on earth are people convinced that places at the top are so valuable that they are worth fighting over?
- Affirmative action is practiced most aggressively in law schools, where black students are routinely offered positions in schools one tier higher than they would otherwise be able to attend. The result? According to the law professor Richard Sander, more than half of all African-American law students in the United States—51.6 percent—are in the bottom 10 percent of their law school class and almost three-quarters fall in the bottom 20 percent.6 After reading about how hard it is to get a science degree if you’re at the bottom of your class, you’ll probably agree that those statistics are terrifying. Remember what Caroline Sacks said? Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner. Sacks isn’t stupid. She’s really, really smart. But Brown University made her feel stupid—and if she truly wanted to graduate with a science degree, the best thing for her to do would have been to go down a notch to Maryland. No sane person would say that the solution to her problems would be for her to go to an even more competitive school like Stanford or MIT. Yet when it comes to affirmative action, that’s exactly what we do. We take promising students like Caroline Sacks—but who happen to be black—and offer to bump them up a notch. And why do we do that? Because we think we’re helping them. That doesn’t mean affirmative action is wrong. It is something done with the best of intentions, and elite schools often have resources available to help poor students that other schools do not. But this does not change the fact that—as Herbert Marsh says—the blessings of the Big Pond are mixed, and it is strange how rarely the Big Pond’s downsides are mentioned.
- 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.
- At the time she was applying to college, Caroline Sacks had no idea she was taking that kind of chance with the thing she loved. Now she does. At the end of our talk, I asked her what would have happened if she had chosen instead to go to the University of Maryland—to be, instead, a Big Fish in a Little Pond. She answered without hesitation: “I’d still be in science.”
- “You know, there’s something about solving a math problem that’s very satisfying,” Randolph said at one point, and an almost wistful look came over his face. “You start with a problem that you may not know how to solve, but you know there are certain rules you can follow and certain approaches you can take, and often during this process, the intermediate result is more complex than what you started with, and then the final result is simple. And there’s a certain joy in making that journey.”
- Chang and his coauthors looked at a sample of several thousand first-year college students and measured which factors played the biggest role in a student’s likelihood of dropping out of science. The most important factor? How academically able the university’s students were. “For every 10-point increase in the average SAT score of an entering cohort of freshmen at a given institution, the likelihood of retention decreased by two percentage points,” the authors write. Interestingly, if you look just at students who are members of ethnic minorities, the numbers are even higher. Every 10-point increase in SAT score causes retention to fall by three percentage points. “Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major,” they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don’t.
- I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:7–10
- A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? What’s your instinctive response? I’m guessing that it is that the ball must cost 10 cents. That can’t be right, though, can it? The bat is supposed to cost $1.00 more than the ball. So if the ball costs 10 cents, the bat must cost $1.10, and we’ve exceeded our total. The right answer must be that the ball costs 5 cents.
- If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? The setup of the question tempts you to answer 100. But it’s a trick. 100 machines take exactly the same amount of time to make 100 widgets as 5 machines take to make 5 widgets. The right answer is 5 minutes.
- These puzzles are two of the three questions that make up the world’s shortest intelligence test.1 It’s called the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). It was invented by the Yale professor Shane Frederick, and it measures your ability to understand when something is more complex than it appears—to move past impulsive answers to deeper, analytic judgments.
- Frederick argues that if you want a quick way to sort people according to their level of basic cognitive ability, his little test is almost as useful as tests that have hundreds of items and take several hours to finish.
- That’s strange, isn’t it? Normally we think that we are better at solving problems when they are presented clearly and simply. But here the opposite happened. A 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font makes reading really frustrating. You have to squint a little bit and maybe read the sentence twice, and you probably wonder halfway through who on earth thought it was a good idea to print out the test this way. Suddenly you have to work to read the question.
- But there are times and places where struggles have the opposite effect—where what seems like the kind of obstacle that ought to cripple an underdog’s chances is actually like Alter and Oppenheimer’s Myriad Pro 10 percent gray, 10-point italics font.
- Can dyslexia turn out to be a desirable difficulty? It is hard to believe that it can, given how many people struggle with the disorder throughout their lives—except for a strange fact. An extraordinarily high number of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. A recent study by Julie Logan at City University London puts the number somewhere around a third.
- Plus, he was a good listener. “Listening,” he says, “is something I’ve been doing essentially all my life. I learned to do it because that was the only way that I could learn. I remember what people say. I remember words they use.” So he would sit in class at law school—while everyone else furiously made notes or doodled or lapsed into daydreams or faded in and out—focusing on what was said and committing what he heard to memory. His memory by that point was a formidable instrument. He had been exercising it, after all, ever since his mother read to him as a child and he memorized what she said. His fellow students, as they made notes and doodled and faded in and out, missed things. Their attention was compromised. Boies didn’t have that problem. He might not have been a reader, but the things he was forced to do because he could not read well turned out to be even more valuable. He started out at Northwestern Law School, then he transferred to Yale.
- And because he likes to practice so much, he gets even better, and on and on, in a virtuous circle. That’s “capitalization learning”: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.
- But desirable difficulties have the opposite logic. In their CRT experiments, Alter and Oppenheimer made students excel by making their lives harder, by forcing them to compensate for something that had been taken away from them. That’s what Boies was doing as well when he learned to listen. He was compensating. He had no choice. He was such a terrible reader that he had to scramble and adapt and come up with some kind of strategy that allowed him to keep pace with everyone around him.
- 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.
- Psychologists measure personality through what is called the Five Factor Model, or “Big Five” inventory, which assesses who we are across the following dimensions:
- Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous versus secure/confident)
- Extraversion (energetic/gregarious versus solitary/reserved)
- Openness (inventive/curious versus consistent/cautious)
- Conscientiousness (orderly/industrious versus easygoing/careless)
- Agreeableness (cooperative/empathic versus self-interested/antagonistic)
- The psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a very particular mix of these traits—particularly the last three: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
- Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too, is obvious.
- But crucially, 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.
- Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention. “If you have a new idea, and it’s disruptive and you’re agreeable, then what are you going to do with that?” says Peterson. “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward.” 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.”
- “My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure,” he said. “The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of the upside than the downside. Because we’re so accustomed to the downside. It doesn’t faze us. I’ve thought about it many times, I really have, because it defined who I am. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my dyslexia. I never would have taken that first chance.”
- Or consider this, from the diary of a young woman whose house was shaken by a nearby explosion: I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. “I’ve been bombed!” I kept on saying to myself, over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. “I’ve been bombed!…I’ve been bombed—me!” It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people were killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.
- We are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration... When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, 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.
- The idea of desirable difficulty suggests that not all difficulties are negative. Being a poor reader is a real obstacle, unless you are David Boies and that obstacle turns you into an extraordinary listener, or unless you are Gary Cohn and that obstacle gives you the courage to take chances you would never otherwise have taken.
- Even today, in his eighties, Freireich is an intimidating man, six foot four and thick through the chest and shoulders. His head is oversize—even for a body as large as his—making him seem bigger still. He is a talker, fluent and relentless and loud, his voice inflected with the hard vowels of his native Chicago. In moments of special emphasis, he has the habit of shouting and pounding the table with his fist—which, memorably, once resulted in his shattering a glass conference table.
- In the 1950s, while studying a sample of famous biologists, the science historian Anne Roe had remarked in passing on how many had at least one parent who died while they were young. The same observation was made a few years later in an informal survey of famous poets and writers like Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Swift, Edward Gibbon, and Thackeray. More than half, it turned out, had lost a father or mother before the age of fifteen. The link between career achievement and childhood bereavement was one of those stray facts that no one knew what to do with.
- What sort of backgrounds and qualities, she wondered, predicted the kind of person capable of rising to the top of British politics at a time when it was the most powerful country in the world? Like Eisenstadt, however, she got sidetracked by a fact that, as she wrote, “occurred so frequently that I began to wonder whether it was not of more than passing significance.” 67% of the prime ministers in her sample lost a parent before the age of sixteen. That’s roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper class—the socioeconomic segment from which most prime ministers came. The same pattern can be found among American presidents. 12 of the first 44 U.S. presidents—beginning with George Washington and going all the way up to Barack Obama—lost their fathers while they were young.
- There is a fascinating passage in an essay by the psychologist Dean Simonton, for example, in which he tries to understand why so many gifted children fail to live up to their early promise. One of the reasons, he concludes, is that they have “inherited an excessive amount of psychological health.” Those who fall short, he says, are children “too conventional, too obedient, too unimaginative, to make the big time with some revolutionary idea.” He goes on: “Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.”
- Parents are essential. Losing a father or a mother is the most devastating thing that can happen to a child. The psychiatrist Felix Brown has found that prisoners are somewhere between two and three times more likely to have lost a parent in childhood than is the population as a whole. That’s too great a difference to be a coincidence. There are, clearly, an enormous number of direct hits from the absence of a parent.
- The evidence produced by Eisenstadt, Iremonger, and the others, however, suggests that there is also such a thing as a remote miss from the death of a parent. Your father can commit suicide and you can suffer from a childhood so unspeakable that you push it to the furthest corners of your memory—and still some good can end up coming from that. “This is not an argument in favour of orphanhood and deprivation,” Brown writes, “but the existence of these eminent orphans does suggest that in certain circumstances a virtue can be made of necessity."
- 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. Do you see the catastrophic error that the Germans made? They bombed London because they thought that the trauma associated with the Blitz would destroy the courage of the British people. In fact, it did the opposite. It created a city of remote misses, who were more courageous than they had ever been before. The Germans would have been better off not bombing London at all.
- Shuttlesworth must have been someone of great resolve and strength. But when he climbed unscathed out of the wreckage of his house, he added an extra layer of psychological armor.
- Losing a parent is not like having your house bombed or being set upon by a crazed mob. It’s worse. It’s not over in one terrible moment, and the injuries do not heal as quickly as a bruise or a wound. But what happens to children whose worst fear is realized—and then they discover that they are still standing? Couldn’t they also gain what Shuttlesworth and the Blitz remote misses gained—a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage?
- 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. Leukemia was a direct hit. He turned it into a remote miss.
- Freireich’s wife is as small as Freireich is enormous, a tiny woman with a deep and obvious reservoir of strength. “I see the man. I see his needs,” she said. He would come home from the hospital late at night, from the blood and the suffering, and she would be there. “She is the first person who ever loved me,” Freireich said simply. “She is my angel from heaven. She found me. I think she detected something in me that could be nourished. I defer to her in all things. She keeps me going every day.”
- She sat in the chair in her husband’s office, this woman who carved an island of calm out of the turbulence of her husband’s life. “You have to realize, of course, that love doesn’t always save people you want to save. Somebody asked me once, weren’t you angry? And I said, no, I wasn’t, I understood her misery.
- The prediction we make about how we are going to feel in some future situation is called “affective forecasting,” and all of the evidence suggests that we are terrible affective forecasters. The psychologist Stanley J. Rachman, for example, has done things like take a group of people terrified of snakes and then show them a snake. Or take a group of claustrophobics and have them stand in a small metal closet. What he finds is that the actual experience of the thing that was feared is a lot less scary than the person imagined.
- He grew up where there was nothing except to overcome. So he was willing to take chances that other people wouldn’t take. I think he felt that there was nothing to lose.” To Mezan, there was no mystery—in his experience over the years—between this kind of outsize pathology in childhood and the larger-than-life successes that some of those bereaved children would have later in adulthood. The fact of having endured and survived such trauma had a liberating effect. “These are people who are able to break the frame of the known world—what’s believed, what’s assumed, what’s common sense, what’s familiar, what everyone takes for granted, whether it’s about cancer or the laws of physics,” he said. “They are not confined to the frame. They have the ability to step outside it, because I think the usual frame of childhood didn’t exist for them. It was shattered.”
- King was outgunned and overmatched. He was the overwhelming underdog. He had, however, an advantage—of the same paradoxical variety as David Boies’s dyslexia or Jay Freireich’s painful childhood. He was from a community that had always been the underdog. 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.
- (Martin Luther) King (Jr) was a moral absolutist who did not stray from his principles even when under attack.
- King’s response? “Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,” he said blithely. “If they want some books, we will get them. I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.”
- ...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.
- What they did is not “right,” just as it is not “right” to send children up against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That’s how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers—and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor.
- We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella’s classroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.
- Jaffe was sitting in her office at New York police headquarters in downtown Manhattan. She was in full uniform—tall and formidable, with a head of thick black hair and more than a hint of Brooklyn in her voice.
- Across the United States, an astonishing number of black men have spent some time in prison. (To give you just one statistic, 69 percent of black male high school dropouts born in the late seventies have done time behind bars.) Brownsville is a neighborhood full of black male high school dropouts, which means that virtually every one of those juvenile delinquents on Jaffe’s list would have had a brother or a father or a cousin who had served time in jail. If that many people in your life have served time behind bars, does the law seem fair anymore? Does it seem predictable? Does it seem like you can speak up and be heard?
- But Leites and Wolf had it backwards. What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them—that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.
- “Father-daughter relationships are kind of a real special thing,” Mike Reynolds said not long ago, looking back on that awful night. He is an older man now. He limps and has lost most of his hair. He sat at a table in his study, in his rambling Mission-style home in Fresno not more than a five-minute drive from the street where his daughter was shot. On the wall behind him was a photograph of Kimber. In the kitchen, next door, was a painting of Kimber with angel’s wings, ascending to heaven. “You may fight with your wife,” he went on, his voice filled with the emotion of the memory. “But your daughter is kind of like the princess—she can do no wrong. And for that matter, her dad is the guy who can fix anything, from a broken tricycle to a broken heart. Daddy can fix everything, and when this happened to our daughter, it was something I couldn’t fix. I literally held her hand while she was dying. It’s a very helpless feeling.” At that moment, he made a vow. “Everything I’ve done ever since is about a promise I made to Kimber on her deathbed,” Reynolds said. “I can’t save your life. But I’m going to do everything in my power to try and prevent this from happening to anybody else.”
- How on earth does changing the severity of punishment deter someone whose brain works like that? You and I are sensitive to increased punishment, because you and I are people with a stake in society. But criminals aren’t.
- Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.
- The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on.” To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish. The Mennonites believe in the inverted-U curve.
- Mike Reynolds would always be grieving.
- To forgive her friend, she realized, she had to forgive Grant. She could not carve out exceptions for the sake of her moral convenience.
jul 11 2020 ∞
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