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

simple homework assignment. I would spend hours daydreaming because I couldn’t really read the words. You’d find yourself sitting in one place for an hour and a half accomplishing nothing. Through seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grade, I was getting mostly Fs, with an occasional D and maybe a C. I was only passing because my mom wouldn’t let them put me back.”
    So how did Grazer get through school? Before any test or exam, he would start to plan and strategize, even in elementary school. “I would get together with someone the night before,” he said. “What are you going to do? How do you think you will answer these questions? I’d try and guess the questions, or if there was a way to get the questions or the tests beforehand, I would.”
    By the time he hit high school, he’d developed a better strategy. “I challenged all my grades,” he went on, “which meant that literally every time I got my grade in high school, after the report cards came out, I would go back to each teacher and do a one-on-one. I would argue my D into a C and my C into a B. And almost every time—ninety percent of the time—I got my grade changed. I would just wear them down. I got really good at it. I got confident. In college, I would study, knowing that I was going to have this hour-long meeting afterward with my professor. I learned how to do everything possible to sell my point. It was really good training.”
    All good parents try to teach their children the art of persuasion, of course. But a normal, well-adjusted child has no need to take those lessons seriously. If you get As in school, you never need to figure out how to negotiate your way to a passing grade, or to look around the room as a nine-year-old and start strategizing about how to make it through the next hour. But when Grazer practiced negotiation, just as when Boies practiced listening, he had a gun to his head. He practiced day in, day out, year after year. When Grazer said that was “really good training,” what he meant was learning to talk his way from a position of weakness to a position of strength turned out to be the perfect preparation for the profession he ended up in. Grazer is now one of the most successful movie producers in Hollywood of the past thirty years. 4 Would Brian Grazer be where he is if he weren’t a dyslexic?

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    Let’s dig a little deeper into this strange association between what is essentially a neurological malfunction and career success. In the Big Pond chapter, I talked about the fact that being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests. Caroline Sacks would have had a better chance of practicing the profession she loved if she had gone to her second-choice school instead of her first choice. Impressionism, similarly, was possible only in the tiny gallery that virtually no one went to, not in the most prestigious art show on earth.
    Dyslexics are outsiders as well. They are forced to stand apart from everyone else at school because they can’t do the thing that school requires them to do. Is it possible for that “outsiderness” to give them some kind of advantage down the line? To answer that question, it is worth thinking about the kind of personality that characterizes innovators and entrepreneurs.
    Psychologists measure personality through what is called the Five Factor Model, or “Big Five” inventory, which assesses who we are across the following dimensions. 5
    Neuroticism
    (sensitive/nervous versus secure/confident)
    Extraversion
    (energetic/gregarious versus solitary/reserved)
    Openness
    (inventive/curious versus consistent/cautious)
    Conscientiousness
    (orderly/industrious versus easygoing/careless)
    Agreeableness
    (cooperative/empathic versus self-interested/antagonistic)
    The psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a very particular mix of these traits—particularly the last three: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
    Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too, is obvious.
    But crucially, innovators need to be dis agreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean