PDF Summary:David and Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell

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How We Misunderstand the Story of David and Goliath

We think David’s victory is miraculous, but it’s more probable than we realize.

David’s perceived disadvantages were actually advantages

• He had no armor or sword, but these would have made him clumsy because he wasn’t used to them.
• He was small, but this allowed him to be fast and agile in his attack.
• He was a lowly shepherd boy rather than an experienced fighter, but protecting his sheep gave him practice in fatally slinging rocks at lions and bears, excellent preparation for his battle with Goliath.

Goliath’s perceived advantages were actually disadvantages

• Goliath was a giant, but medical experts believe this was due to a condition called acromegaly that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. This condition also causes vision problems, which proved fatal to Goliath, who couldn’t see what David was up to until it was too late.
• Goliath had a lot of battle experience, but these prior experiences led him to assume that David would engage with him in traditional hand-to-hand combat. By declining to follow the conventional strategies, David caught him off guard.
• Goliath was...

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• They took advantage of the opponent’s weaknesses: Like Goliath with his burdensome weapons and armor, the Turks’ extensive material resources weighed them down and rendered them immobile, trapped between the sea and the desert. By approaching from the desert side, Lawrence’s army hemmed the Turks in, leaving them little room for escape.
• They didn’t allow their opponents to capitalize on their strengths: The Turks had modern weapons and material resources, but the Arabs’ surprise attack didn’t give the Turks time to utilize their resources to their full potential.
• They used their “disadvantages” to their advantage: The Arab soldiers carried only a rifle and a hundred rounds of ammunition. They brought little water or food. But, like David, they used their lack of weaponry and supplies to their advantage. Traveling light allowed them to cover upwards of 100 miles a day.
• They were audacious: Traveling 600 miles through the desert in the summer is bold. Few would have had the audacity, which is part of what made their appearance at Aqaba so surprising.

Example #2: Unconventional Basketball Plays

Vivek Ranadivé, an Indian immigrant who had...

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Is there a point at which more money triggers a decrease in happiness, completing the upside-down-U shape? Many social scientists claim that, yes, you can have too much of a good thing, as we’ll explore further in the example of money’s effect on parenting, below.

The tendency of graphs toward an inverted-U shape shows us that many things we think of as unequivocally advantageous, like money or material resources, aren’t. Nothing is good, evil, or even neutral. An item’s value often depends on how much of it you have. It’s advantageous until you have so much of it that its value becomes neutral. At the point of overabundance, its value goes from neutral to negative. What was an advantage in a limited amount becomes a disadvantage in a large amount.

Let’s see how this plays out in two examples.

Example #1: More money does not necessarily lead to easier parenting

(Shortform note: Gladwell implicitly defines “parenting” as spending time with your children and instilling in them the values of hard work and independence.)

Picture the inverted U again. If the X-axis is wealth and the Y-axis is the “easiness” of parenting (0 being not easy at all), poverty is...

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Why does how we view our abilities matter?

Our perceptions have real-world consequences. Let’s take a look at the drop-out rates at Hartwick College and Harvard to see the “Big Fish-Little Pond Effect” influences graduation rates in STEM fields.

In America, more than 50% of all students majoring in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) drop out before receiving a degree. The majority of those who drop out are in the middle or bottom third of the class (ranked by SAT scores). This is true regardless of the university.

• Of those with SAT scores in the top third of their class, 45-55% will graduate with a STEM degree
• Of those in the middle third, 22-35% will graduate
• Of those in the bottom third, 11-20% will graduate

The fact that dropout-rate distribution is roughly consistent across colleges is surprising. Let’s say you score 569 (out of 800) on the SAT and you’re offered the choice between attending Hartwick College in upstate New York (Little Pond) and attending Harvard (Big Pond).

• An SAT score of 569 would place you in the top third at Hartwick. Because you’d be in the top third, you’d have a 55% chance of...

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Capitalization Learning versus Compensation Learning

Most of our learning can be roughly divided into two types:

• Capitalization learning is the type we do when we get better and better at the things we’re naturally good at because we enjoy doing what comes naturally and easily. We capitalize on our strengths.
  • If you sing well and have perfect pitch, you will likely join a choir.
• Compensation learning is the type we do when we need to compensate for a crucial skill we lack. This is learning out of necessity.
  • Schools put a premium on the written word. If you have severe dyslexia and struggle to read, to succeed you need to develop abilities that compensate for your inability to read.

It’s not a given that someone with a deficiency in one area will automatically compensate for it by developing extraordinary talents in another area. But those that can do this are better off than they would be if they didn’t have the deficiency, because compensation learning (gained through struggle) is more powerful than capitalization learning (which is relatively easy).

Dyslexia: For Some, a Desirable Difficulty

A surprisingly high percentage (one...

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*   The Germans thought that by bombing London, they would destroy the courage of the Brits. In fact, the Germans created courage in a country that was previously scared. Surviving the bombing, Londoners gained self-confidence and realized that the bombing wasn’t as bad as they had anticipated.

The Trauma of Losing a Parent

When you’re a child, it’s your worst fear that one of your parents, your providers and protectors, will die. You can’t imagine being able to survive such a loss. We assume that children of deceased parents are worse off than peers who did not lose a parent in childhood. Are they?

A 1960s study showed that 45% of high-achieving people (judged by whether or not their lives filled more than one column in an encyclopedia) had lost a parent before the age of 20. Various studies have repeated these findings among subgroups. For instance, more than half of famous poets lost a parent before the age of 15. 67% of English Prime Ministers, from 1800 to the start of WWII, lost a parent before the age of 16. And 27% of American Presidents, from Washington to Obama, lost a parent while young. (Shortform note: “young” isn’t defined here.)

**Losing a parent is...

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Walker devised a plan for Birmingham called Project C (“C” for confrontation). The last stage was a series of marches devised, in part, to fill up the jails with protesters. Jailing marchers was one way to smother the “civil rights problem,” but what would Goliath (in this case, public safety commissioner Bull Connor) do when all the jails were full? He would have to deal with the protesters directly.

The success of Walker’s plan depended on getting Bull Connor to fight back. The hope was that if they could get Connor to blatantly mistreat protesters, the news coverage would generate sympathy for the movement across the nation and in the government.

Connor didn’t want King’s marchers to cross into “white” Birmingham, and he would do anything in his power to keep them from doing it. Walker and King knew this about Connor. They also knew that Connor was itching for a fight. Walker’s plan was classic Brer Rabbit—figuring out what the enemy wanted more than anything and then using that knowledge to bait him.

As tricky as it was, a version of the plan had already failed at least once. Walker and King had just come from Albany, Georgia, where their campaign was a disaster....

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Aiming to scare the rioters on both sides, Freeland threatened to shoot anyone caught throwing gasoline bombs. This backfired. The more Freeland threatened, the more violence occurred.

• In 1969, there were 13 deaths.
• In 1971, there were 184 deaths.
• In 1972, there were 497 deaths.

In response to the violence, Freeland suspended civil rights and brought in more troops. The army held suspects in prison without a trial, and soon, most Catholics had at least one family member in prison.

One incident demonstrates Freeland’s soldiers’ liberal use of force (and how it backfired).

• After receiving a tip that one house in Lower Falls, a Catholic neighborhood, contained explosives, the army came to search it. The local priest warned that the residents would cause trouble if the soldiers didn’t complete the raid quickly.
• As the soldiers started to leave the neighborhood in their armored cars, a few young men threw rocks at them. The soldiers stopped the cars and brought out the tear gas. The conflict escalated quickly from there.
• The priest begged the soldiers to stop the tear gas, promising to restore order if they did, but the soldiers refused to...

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• Convictions of rape dropped by 10.9%
• Robbery dropped by 38.7%
• Assault dropped by 22.1%

So it was an unequivocal success? Not exactly. California’s crime rates began to decrease before the enforcement of the Three Strikes Law. At the same time, they were decreasing across the country, in areas that didn’t have a version of the Three Strikes Law. Studies on the law’s effectiveness are mixed.

Why might the Three Strikes Law be ineffective?

1) It depends on the rationality of criminals. The Three Strikes Law is based on the idea that criminals behave rationally—If the consequence is more jail time, people will think twice before committing a crime. But most criminals don’t sit around weighing the risks and benefits of a crime they’re planning. Many repeat offenders are drug addicts. The crystal-meth addict who killed Reynolds’ daughter would later say of his thought process that he wasn’t “thinking much a nothing.”

When researchers interviewed armed robbers, many said that thinking about getting caught was a distraction, so they pushed it out of their minds. One said that he gets high so that by the time he’s committing a crime, he doesn’t care about...

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After a century of being outcasts (or worse), the community had learned that they could withstand terrifying events. They were no longer afraid. In this sense, they were “remote misses”: The French made the Huguenots stronger by trying, over a century, to obliterate them.

(Perhaps not incidentally, Trocmé’s mother died when he was 10, another traumatic, and perhaps advantageous, event.)

2. Disagreeableness: Trocmé and his fellow Huguenots didn’t care what others thought of them. Their countrymen had never thought well of them, so there was no good opinion to lose, and they certainly didn’t care what the Nazis, or the Occupation government, thought of them. They evaluated their actions by the words of the Gospel, not the opinions of others.

Although Trocmé had a family to worry about and was generally careful to keep from getting caught, he didn’t really care if he was arrested. He was willing to die for his beliefs. The townspeople also didn’t care about the consequences doled out by the authorities.

How do you defeat an adversary who isn’t bothered by your punishments? The Huguenots’ indifference to retribution made them, as a community, invincible. The government...

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The Morale Project

There was really only one problem: The U.S. didn’t know anything about its enemy, the Viet Cong.

Leon Gouré worked for the RAND Corporation, which developed the Morale Project. Its goal was to understand the motivations of people who joined the Viet Cong. For the project, dozens of researchers interviewed people who had defected from the Viet Cong or were captured current members. Because so few people showed an interest in hearing their stories, the subjects were often very willing to talk.

Gouré’s Interpretation of the Morale Project Evidence

Gouré, who read all the interview transcripts, told military and government officials that American bombing was making a huge difference in the conflict. He said that many people were defecting from the Viet Cong and that civilians in the countryside welcomed U.S. involvement in the region.

Gouré had evidence to support this interpretation: The number of defectors who thought the Viet Cong would win the war decreased from 65% to 20% after a year of increased U.S. bombing.

Gouré filtered the evidence through a military logic that said that a miniscule country with no resources had to succumb to the...