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

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