Photo credit: Bill Wadman In his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (out now), Gladwell weaves together a wildly compelling series of true stories—Hungarian immigrants, civil rights activists, a scrappy girls’ basketball team—to reveal how the little guy is frequently able to topple the leviathans of history and culture.
Feel like a David? Here, Gladwell offers his advice on how to rise above adversity—and beat your Goliath’s butt.
Men’s Health: David and Goliath began as a magazine piece for The New Yorker, where you’ve worked since 1996, but the timing is perfect for this book, culturally, when so many of us feel so helpless.
Malcolm Gladwell: I had written that magazine article and then went on with my life, but I kept coming back to the ideas in it for essentially the reasons you’ve just identified: There were issues in that story that felt really current to me. It really felt like this is what people were thinking and worrying about. The book is about lopsided conflicts, and our world is suddenly very filled with lots and lots of them. I always like to tackle topics that I think are kind of central to a broader cultural conversation. This one seemed to fit the bill.
MH: This is kind of a flipside to your book Outliers, which is about how we can foster and cultivate success in the world. How do they work as companion pieces, from your point of view?
Gladwell: That book is kind of interested in broad outlines and general principles of success. But this one is full of quite idiosyncratic stories and very specific individuals and the ways in which they’ve chosen to defy expectations or to stand up to their own destinies or even the ways they’ve chosen to squander their advantages. If Outliers [Ed: which suggested that 10,000 hours of practice could make someone at least reasonably successful at just about anything] is a general kind of manifesto, then this is a very, very deeply personal kind of book.
MH: All the people in David and Goliath express gratitude for the adversity in their lives—an appreciation somehow of the obstacles they’ve faced. How important is it to have that perspective?
Gladwell: The thing I discovered is that when you talk to people who have done something meaningful, that’s what they come back to: They grow as much from what didn’t go right as from what did go right, and they seem to have learned more from the obstacles than the advantages. That’s almost a cliché, but it’s true and it’s a source of incredible fascination for me. A positive attitude and an appreciation of one’s underdog status actually can make a difference in who we are and what we do.
MH: The chapter on the underdog youth basketball team from Silicon Valley that uses the full court press to a league championship is really terrific.
Gladwell: The point of that story is that what you’re teaching those kids—who were not very tall or very athletic or particularly skilled, and who were, in a traditional basketball game, outmatched in virtually every way, almost all the time—is that they don’t have to passively accept their fates. Just because you’re smaller or less talented, it doesn’t mean you have no options. The refusal to accept the kind of fate that’s been laid out for you? That’s fantastic. Long after those kids forget about lay ups and dribbling, they will remember that point.
MH: What’s a current David and Goliath tale that may, as you write in the book, “produce greatness and beauty”?
Gladwell: That’s a very, very difficult question. We almost never know in the moment what’s going to happen. The other thing is: There are only a small number of these exceptional cases, where an underdog really transcends his or her station or fate to become truly great. Most of the time, sadly, that doesn’t happen. I hope it happens more. It’s very hard to know who’s going to come out on top and who isn’t. But people talk a lot about this generation that’s just coming out of college now, with a very, very high unemployment rate. Some part of me thinks that generation’s actually going to turn out okay. This is a generation that grew up very, very privileged—probably more privileged than any other generation in American history—and has been blessed with this moment of technological explosion. They have a little window where they can’t get a job and they’re being forced to sort of rely on their instincts and their wits a bit. Will we look back 25 years from now and say all of this unemployment for that generation was somehow a blessing in disguise? We just might. Great things may come from it.
MH: What prescription do you have for those of us who feel like Davids in the world? How do we face the giants in our lives more efficiently and confidently?
Gladwell: It goes back to the idea that there is no reason to passively accept a certain fate. There are enough examples in the world of underdogs who have found a way to triumph that we should not look on these lopsided conflicts as a fait accompli. They’re not. They’re only lopsided on paper. In the real world, all kinds of unexpected shifts and trends can happen. All kinds of things can be learned from diversity. Similarly, all kinds of advantages can prove to be disabling. We just have to have a good deal more skepticism about the notions that these battles are over before they begin.
MH: Who is your favorite David, or underdog, in the world?
Gladwell: Well, I’m a big Buffalo Bills fan. I’ve been rooting for underdogs for the last 15 years, with all the suffering one can fancy. [Laughs] It’s been rough going. But anything can happen . . . except for the Bills.
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