The story of David and Goliath is one of an epic fight in ancient Palestine between a warrior giant and a young shepherd boy. The outcome decided the fate of their nations. Contrary to everyone’s expectations, the shepherd emerged victorious, and the tale has been handed down across the millennia as the ultimate example of the underdog beating the odds. According to journalist Malcolm Gladwell, however, this isn’t an accurate assessment of the event. In this story, as with many others in our own time, we overestimate the power of life’s giants and underestimate the strength and opportunities available to the underdogs. 

When Goliath the Philistine challenged a warrior to come forward from Israel’s ranks and fight him to the death, he was participating in a military practice common in the ancient world. In order to avoid massive bloodshed on both sides, warring nations would each choose a warrior as their representative. The warrior’s win would be counted as his nation’s victory.

Scholars believe that Goliath was at least six foot-nine. He came thundering into the valley’s basin with an enormous sword and two bronze javelins that could break through a shield and armor. The combined weight of his armor was over one hundred pounds. For some reason, Israel was not teeming with eager volunteers to take on the behemoth. But when a teenage shepherd named David heard him talking trash about God and homeland, David stepped forward. Everyone viewed him as an underdog, including Israel’s King, Saul, who gave David his armor to get him ready. David rejected the armor, opting instead for his sling and some stones from a nearby riverbed.   

In the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, each item beats one item and is vulnerable to the other. We can understand ancient warfare in a similar way. In the this world there were three main groupings of soldiers: the infantry, or foot soldiers; the cavalry, or fighters either on horseback or in chariots, and the artillery, archers and sling-shooters.

Goliath was a foot soldier who expected another foot solider to meet him for close-up, hand-to-hand combat. Using the metric of brute strength, David was hopelessly outmatched. But David entered the fight as a marksman, completely altering the dynamics of the fight. Someone experienced with a slingshot could sling a rock up to 150 miles per hour and hit a target 200 meters away; Goliath would have been much closer. One historian remarked that Goliath might as well have been going up against an adversary with an automatic pistol. Thus, the shepherd reduced a war hero to sitting duck.

Everyone was hoping for a warrior to match Goliath’s strength, but a swift surprise attack proved far more effective. The point is that we, like Goliath, the Israelites, and the Philistines, often misjudge life’s giants; we fail to see the limits of their power or the potential of underdogs.

Dyslexia is a condition in which gray matter associated with reading and writing is not properly assembled while the child is in utero. This usually isn’t a noticeable problem until kids start attending school and begin falling behind their peers. This inability to keep up can lead to a sense of isolation and frustration. There’s a logical reason dyslexics are more likely to end up in juvenile detention facilities: they can’t quite get their heads around what’s going on, and they act out, sometimes in a verbally or physically violent manner.

We tend to view dyslexia as an impediment, but could it also be an amazing opportunity? A recent study conducted at City University London found that about one third of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. Some might interpret this as people succeeding despite the set back of dyslexia. A more plausible explanation is that they have succeeded because of it.

Take David Boies for an example. Dylexia hindered his ability to comprehend what he read, and people mistook him for an idiot. But because he couldn’t read well, he developed his auditory skills. While his classmates in law school madly scribbled notes to keep up with the lecture, Boies simply listened, absorbing every detail as he had learned to do when his mother read him books as a child. His highly developed auditory abilities served him well as a lawyer because he could recall precise comments that other lawyers would forget and hold a witness’s feet to the fire. He is now one of the world’s finest trial lawyers.

Or consider Brian Grazer, a highly successful movie producer in Hollywood. Growing up, students and teachers were convinced he was an idiot. He would spend hours staring blankly at simple homework assignments, and for most of middle and high school he earned mostly Ds and Fs—or at least they started as Ds and Fs. At the end of each term, he would talk with his teachers after class and make a case that he deserved a better grade than what the ledger showed. So Ds became Cs and Cs became Bs. Nine times out of ten, Glazer was successful in persuading his teachers to raise his grade. He developed a silver tongue, and it became an end-of-term ritual that he continued throughout undergrad. This skill served him well as a movie producer, doing everything he could to make a pitch stick. The straight-A student does not hone the skill of negotiation in the classroom, but the dyslexic student who never got As might need to in order to salvage failing grades.

Dylexics are outsiders in some ways. This has led to tragic isolation for some, but it’s also this very thing that gives some dyslexics an edge over others. They are forced to compensate by honing a different set of skills. Just like that shepherd boy in ancient Palestine, many people would view the dyslexic as the underdog. But the cases of Boies and Grazer show us that disadvantages are sometimes opportunities in disguise; that these desirable difficulties can become huge advantages later down the line.

Impressionism was once an avant-garde movement in Europe—and not the positive, innovative sense. One critic derisively compared Impressionism’s defining characteristics to filling a pistol with paint and firing on canvas. This opinion held sway in 1860s Paris. At that time, there was a small gaggle of no-name artists that would gather at Café Guerbois. Among their rag-tag ranks were Monet, Pisarro, Manet, Cézanne, Renoir, and Degas—all of whom are now world-famous. Together they dreamed and schemed about how to have their artwork admitted at the Salon, the premiere exhibition in Paris at that time. Each year, painters would submit their two or three best pieces, and judges would accept or—as was usually the case—reject them. 

Artwork that met with unanimous approval from the judges was hung at eye-level in the venue. The pieces that were selected but had received mixed reviews would be displayed, but far higher up in the hall, virtually out of view. It was diificult to have your artwork featured at the Salon, let alone visible from ground level.

One can only take so much rejection. In the end, many of the Impressionists who gathered at this obscure café chose artistic freedom, innovation, and a supportive community where constructive criticism could be offered over the prestige of the Salon. They began to show their work in small venues, and developed reputations within their burgeoning sphere of artists and admirers.

History bears out the wisdom of this choice: the Impressionists’ works are hanging in the world’s most prestigious galleries—remembered and revered in a way that many artists with eye-level Salon pieces no longer are.  

This matters for us today because this choice between being a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond is one that faces us in numerous spheres of life. Take college admissions as an example: the common assumption is that a high school senior could not do better than admission into an Ivy League school. The truth is that there are tradeoffs to attending an Ivy League that merit a pause. The environment tends to be more cutthroat than collaborative, and, while the students who are in the top percentile feel pretty good about themselves, students who are farther down the academic totem pole often develop an inferiority complex—even though they are amazingly bright kids. This sense of inferiority makes students more risk averse and they miss out on opportunities—opportunities that they might have seized if they were fueled by the confidence of being a top performer at a good-not-great university. These students are kind of like of art displayed on the higher tiers of the Salon—they’re in a top venue, but go virtually unnoticed. 

Sometimes power is not as powerful as we think. Consider the story of Le Chambon, a village that hid Jewish refugees in a Nazi-occupied France. When the French surrendered to the Nazis in the summer of 1940, the Germans allowed the French to run their own internal affairs—with a few quid pro quos like as systematically rounding up Jews and mandatory Nazi-style salutes. Most people submitted to the new rules, but the townspeople of Le Chambon refused. For several centuries, this mountainous outpost had become a hub for Huguenots, the French Protestants who had broken away from the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church spent the next three hundred years hounding the Huguenots. Almost a quarter of a million fled France. Those who stayed literally ran for the hills and kept a low profile.

The Hugenots of Le Chambon—ever the dissenting voices in French society—refused to cooperate with the new fiats. The town’s pastor, André Trocmé, reminded the congregants (i.e., the whole village) that while loving, caring for, and forgiving enemies is imperative for followers of Jesus, it is also vital to have the courage to reject regulations that go against the grain of their spiritual convictions. The stiff-armed Nazi salute would be an example of a rule to be rejected. Ringing the bell for purposes of state was another.  Turning in Jewish refugees instead of harboring them was yet another.  The Jews came in droves to this small mountain town, where the villagers hid and smuggled them out of France through the mountainous mazeways they’d memorized to avoid persecutors. The Huguenots understood what it meant to be refugees.

One time a government official came to organize the youth according to Hitler Youth standards. He expected a pomp-and-circumstance welcome. Instead, a group of young people at Le Chambon handed him a letter, informing him that, yes, they were hiding Jews, and, no, the Nazis would not be getting any of them.

When Trocmé and his assistant pastor were arrested and questioned, they refused to trade Jews for their own freedom. To the surprise of their interrogators, they flatly refused to stop their subversive activities, even in the face of prison and death. The police let them go anyway. What could they do against these iron-willed men who planned on continuing to disobey rules the moment they were released? Executing them was not an option. To kill them would make martyrs, and many more Andre Trocmes would spring up to take the pastors’ place.

The government had more important things to worry about than rebellious hill people, like the Eastern front, which was not going well at that time. Even when the Nazis did try to address Le Chambon’s harboring of Jews, they were unsuccessful in making more than a few arrests.

History has born out that excessive, illegitimate force fosters defiance rather than submissiveness. There was only such much the Nazis could do. Popes and monarchs had failed to purge France of the Huguenots after centuries of concerted effort; similar attempts would be an exercise in futility. The use of power and resources to wipe out the Huguenots over the centuries had made them a wildly resourceful, rebellious, and resilient people. The underdogs had a power of their own that was not to be underestimated.

In oppressed societies, a subversive “trickster hero” often becomes an important part of a culture’s lore. In some parts of Africa, there’s a sneaky spider named Anansi. For the African-American slaves, there was Brer Rabbit, who managed to outwit Brer Fox and his fellow bullies. The slaves would express their longings for freedom and vicariously experience a sense of victory over their white masters through the tales of Brer Rabbit’s trickery.

Perhaps no one embodied this Brer Rabbit trickery better than Wyatt Walker. Walker worked with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, but, unlike King, who did his best to toe a moral-absolutist line, Walker was a pragmatist, ready to do something edgy to gain an edge. Walker played tricks on the oppressor that were straight out of Brer Rabbit’s playbook: instigating, provoking, playing coy when questioned.

Eugene “Bull” Connor was the violently racist police commissioner in Birmingham at that time. Wyatt did everything he could to tweak him and the police force, sending them on wild goose chases by impersonating a white, educated tone of voice in phone calls to the police station. Oppressed people groups have to learn not only their own groups’ communication style, but also that of their oppressors. It was a matter of survival to learn not just what the white man’s words meant, but also what was implied in his tones and gestures.

On May 3, 1963, Walker and King orchestrated a student protest that would land another nail in the coffin of segregation. Bull Connor and his police brought out the dogs to counter the protests. One black student walked serenely towards a German shepherd, knowing full well that the animal would attack. A photographer present captured the disturbing image, and it made waves across the country. The New York Times made it the front-page story. JFK was shocked by it, and his administration worried about the bad international press. America could not stop talking about it.

When underdogs have nothing to lose, they become dangerous.  This is yet another underdog advantage that often goes overlooked.