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

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. Schwarzenegger 3 —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