David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

by Malcolm Gladwell

  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. To prove his point, Frederick gave the CRT to students at nine American colleges, and the results track pretty closely with how students from those colleges would rank on more traditional intelligence tests.2 Students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—perhaps the brainiest college in the world—averaged 2.18 correct answers out of three. Students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, another extraordinarily elite institution, averaged 1.51 right answers out of three. Harvard students scored 1.43; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1.18; and the University of Toledo 0.57.

  The CRT is really hard. But here’s the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise people’s scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder. The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That’s pretty good, though it is well short of the 2.18 that MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read—a 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font—so that it looked like this:

  1. 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?

  The average score this time around? 2.45. Suddenly, the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.

  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.

  Yet all that extra effort pays off. As Alter says, making the questions “disfluent” causes people to “think more deeply about whatever they come across. They’ll use more resources on it. They’ll process more deeply or think more carefully about what’s going on. If they have to overcome a hurdle, they’ll overcome it better when you force them to think a little harder.” Alter and Oppenheimer made the CRT more difficult. But that difficulty turned out to be desirable.

  Not all difficulties have a silver lining, of course. What Caroline Sacks went through, in her organic chemistry class at Brown was an undesirable difficulty. She is a curious, hardworking, talented student who loves science—and there was no advantage to putting her in a situation where she felt demoralized and inadequate. The struggle did not give her a new appreciation of science. It scared her away from science. 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. The list includes many of the most famous innovators of the past few decades. Richard Branson, the British billionaire entrepreneur, is dyslexic. Charles Schwab, the founder of the discount brokerage that bears his name, is dyslexic, as are the cell phone pioneer Craig McCaw; David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue; John Chambers, the CEO of the technology giant Cisco; Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s—to name just a few. The neuroscientist Sharon Thompson-Schill remembers speaking at a meeting of prominent university donors—virtually all of them successful businesspeople—and on a whim asking how many of them had ever been diagnosed with a learning disorder. “Half the hands went up,” she said. “It was unbelievable.”

  There are two possible interpretations for this fact. One is that this remarkable group of people triumphed in spite of their disability: they are so smart and so creative that nothing—not even a lifetime of struggling with reading—could stop them. The second, more intriguing, possibility is that they succeeded, in part, because of their disorder—that they learned something in their struggle that proved to be of enormous advantage. Would you wish dyslexia on your child? If the second of these possibilities is true, you just might.

  3.

  David Boies grew up in farming country in rural Illinois. He was the eldest of five. His parents were public school teachers. His mother would read to him when he was young. He would memorize what she said because he couldn’t follow what was on the page. He didn’t begin to read until the third grade, and then did so only slowly and with great difficulty. Many years later, he would realize that he had dyslexia. But at the time, he didn’t think he had a problem. His little town in rural Illinois wasn’t a place that regarded reading well as some crucial badge of achievement. Many of his schoolmates quit school to work on the farm the first chance they got. Boies read comic books, which were easy to follow and had lots of pictures. He never read for fun. Even today, he might read one book a year, if that. He watches television—anything, he says with a laugh, “that moves and is in color.” His speaking vocabulary is limited. He uses small words and short sentences. Sometimes if he’s reading something out loud and runs into a word he doesn’t know, he will stop and spell it out slowly. “My wife gave me an iPad a year and a half ago, which was my first computer-like device, and one of the things that was interesting is that my attempt to spell many words is not close enough for spell-check to find the correct spelling,” Boies says. “I can’t tell you how many times I get the little message that says, ‘No spelling suggestions.’”

  When Boies graduated from high school, he didn’t have any great ambitions. His grades had been “ragged.” His family had moved to Southern California by then, and the local economy was booming. He got a job in construction. “It was outside work, with older guys,” Boies remembers. “I was making more money than I could ever have imagined. It was a lot of fun.” After that, he worked for a while as a bookkeeper in a bank while playing a lot of bridge on the side. “It was a great life. I could have gone on like that for a while. But after our first child was born, my wife became increasingly serious-minded about my future.” She brought home brochures and pamphlets from local colleges and universities. He remembered a childhood fascination with the law and decided that he would go to law school. Today David Boies is one of the most famous trial lawyers in the world.

  How Boies went from a construction worker with a high school education to the top of the legal profession is a puzzle, to say the least. The law is built around reading—around cases and opinions and scholarly analyses—and Boies is someone for whom reading is a struggle. It seems crazy that he would even have considered the law. But let’s not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader—and that means you’ve probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get around reading.

  Boies started college at the University of Redlands, a small private university an hour east of Los Angeles. Going there was his first break. Redlands was a Small Pond. Boies excelled there. He worked hard and was very well organized—because he knew he had to be. Then he got lucky. Redlands required a number of core courses for graduation, all of which involved heavy reading requirements. In those years, however, one could apply to law school without completing an undergraduate degree. Boies simply skipped the core courses. “I remember when I found out I could go to law school without graduating,” he says. “It was so great. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Law school, of course, required even more reading. But Boies discovered that there were summaries of the major cases—guides
that would boil down the key point of a long Supreme Court opinion to a page or so. “People might tell you that’s an undesirable way to do law school,” he says. “But it was functional.” 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.

  When Boies became a lawyer, he did not choose to practice corporate law. That would have been foolish. Corporate lawyers need to work their way through mountains of documents and appreciate the significance of the minor footnote on page 367. He became a litigator, a job that required him to think on his feet. He memorizes what he needs to say. Sometimes in court he stumbles when he has to read something and comes across a word that he cannot process in time. So he stops and spells it out, like a child in a spelling bee. It’s awkward. It’s more of an eccentricity, though, than an actual problem. In the 1990s, he headed the prosecution team accusing Microsoft of antitrust violations, and during the trial, he kept referring to “login” as “lojin,” which is just the kind of mistake a dyslexic makes. But he was devastating in the cross-examination of witnesses, because there was no nuance, no subtle evasion, no peculiar and telling choice of words that he would miss—and no stray comment or revealing admission from testimony an hour or a day or a week before that he would not have heard, registered, and remembered.

  “If I could read a lot faster, it would make a lot of things that I do easier,” Boies said. “There’s no doubt about that. But on the other hand, not being able to read a lot and learning by listening and asking questions means that I need to simplify issues to their basics. And that is very powerful, because in trial cases, judges and jurors—neither of them have the time or the ability to become an expert in the subject. One of my strengths is presenting a case that they can understand.” His opponents tend to be scholarly types, who have read every conceivable analysis of the issue at hand. Time and again, they get bogged down in excessive detail. Boies doesn’t.

  One of his most famous cases—Hollingsworth v. Schwarzenegger3—involved a California law limiting marriage to a man and woman. Boies was the attorney arguing that the law was unconstitutional, and in the trial’s most memorable exchange, Boies destroyed the other side’s key expert witness, David Blankenhorn, getting him to concede huge chunks of Boies’s case.

  “One of the things you tell a witness when you’re preparing them is take your time,” Boies said. “Even when you don’t need to. Because there will be some times when you need to slow down, and you don’t want to show the examiner by your change of pace that this is something that you need time on. So—when were you born?” He spoke carefully and deliberately. “‘It…was…1941.’ You don’t say, ‘ItwasMarcheleventh1941atsix-thirtyinthemorning,’ even though you’re not trying to hide it. You want your response to be the same for the easy things as for the harder things so that you don’t reveal what’s easy and what’s hard by the way you answer.”

  When Blankenhorn paused just a bit too much in certain crucial moments, Boies caught it. “It was tone and pace and the words he used. Some of it comes from pauses. He’d slow down when he was trying to think of how to phrase something. He was somebody who as you probed him and listened to him, you could hear areas where he was uncomfortable—where he would use an obscuring word. And by being able to zero in on those areas, I was able to get him to admit the key elements of our case.”

  4.

  Boies has a particular skill that helps to explain why he is so good at what he does. He’s a superb listener. But think about how he came to develop that skill. Most of us gravitate naturally toward the areas where we excel. The child who picks up reading easily goes on to read even more and becomes even better at it, and ends up in a field that requires a lot of reading. A young boy named Tiger Woods is unusually coordinated for his age and finds that the game of golf suits his imagination, and so he likes to practice golf. 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.

  It is striking how often successful dyslexics tell versions of this same compensation story. “It was horrible to be in school,” a man named Brian Grazer told me. “My body chemistry would always change. I would be anxious, really anxious. It would take forever to do a simple homework assignment. I would spend hours daydreaming because I couldn’t really read the words. You’d find yourself sitting in one place for an hour and a half accomplishing nothing. Through seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grade, I was getting mostly Fs, with an occasional D and maybe a C. I was only passing because my mom wouldn’t let them put me back.”

  So how did Grazer get through school? Before any test or exam, he would start to plan and strategize, even in elementary school. “I would get together with someone the night before,” he said. “What are you going to do? How do you think you will answer these questions? I’d try and guess the questions, or if there was a way to get the questions or the tests beforehand, I would.”

  By the time he hit high school, he’d developed a better strategy. “I challenged all my grades,” he went on, “which meant that literally every time I got my grade in high school, after the report cards came out, I would go back to each teacher and do a one-on-one. I would argue my D into a C and my C into a B. And almost every time—ninety percent of the time—I got my grade changed. I would just wear them down. I got really good at it. I got confident. In college, I would study, knowing that I was going to have this hour-long meeting afterward with my professor. I learned how to do everything possible to sell my point. It was really good training.”

  All good parents try to teach their children the art of persuasion, of course. But a normal, well-adjusted child has no need to take those lessons seriously. If you get As in school, you never need to figure out how to negotiate your way to a passing grade, or to look around the room as a nine-year-old and start strategizing about how to make it through the ne
xt hour. But when Grazer practiced negotiation, just as when Boies practiced listening, he had a gun to his head. He practiced day in, day out, year after year. When Grazer said that was “really good training,” what he meant was learning to talk his way from a position of weakness to a position of strength turned out to be the perfect preparation for the profession he ended up in. Grazer is now one of the most successful movie producers in Hollywood of the past thirty years.4 Would Brian Grazer be where he is if he weren’t a dyslexic?

  5.

  Let’s dig a little deeper into this strange association between what is essentially a neurological malfunction and career success. In the Big Pond chapter, I talked about the fact that being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests. Caroline Sacks would have had a better chance of practicing the profession she loved if she had gone to her second-choice school instead of her first choice. Impressionism, similarly, was possible only in the tiny gallery that virtually no one went to, not in the most prestigious art show on earth.

  Dyslexics are outsiders as well. They are forced to stand apart from everyone else at school because they can’t do the thing that school requires them to do. Is it possible for that “outsiderness” to give them some kind of advantage down the line? To answer that question, it is worth thinking about the kind of personality that characterizes innovators and entrepreneurs.

  Psychologists measure personality through what is called the Five Factor Model, or “Big Five” inventory, which assesses who we are across the following dimensions.5

  Neuroticism

  (sensitive/nervous versus secure/confident)