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

a bit callously), “the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors, so from that point of view, the killed do not matter. Put this way the fact is obvious, corpses do not run about spreading panic.”
    The next group he called the near misses:
    They feel the blast, they see the destruction, are horrified by the carnage, perhaps they are wounded, but they survive deeply impressed. “Impression” means, here, a powerful reinforcement of the fear reaction in association with bombing. It may result in “shock,” a loose term that covers anything from a dazed state or actual stupor to jumpiness and preoccupation with the horrors that have been witnessed.
    Third, he said, are the remote misses . These are the people who listen to the sirens, watch the enemy bombers overhead, and hear the thunder of the exploding bombs. But the bomb hits down the street or the next block over. And for them, the consequences of a bombing attack are exactly the opposite of the near-miss group. They survived, and the second or third time that happens, the emotion associated with the attack, MacCurdy wrote, “is a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability.” A near miss leaves you traumatized. A remote miss makes you think you are invincible.
    In diaries and recollections of Londoners who lived through the Blitz, there are countless examples of this phenomenon. Here is one:
    When the first siren sounded I took my children to our dug-out in the garden and I was quite certain we were all going to be killed. Then the all-clear went without anything having happened. Ever since we came out of the dug-out I have felt sure nothing would ever hurt us.
    Or consider this, from the diary of a young woman whose house was shaken by a nearby explosion:
    I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. “I’ve been bombed! ” I kept on saying to myself, over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. “I’ve been bombed!…I’ve been bombed— me! ”
    It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people were killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.
    So why were Londoners so unfazed by the Blitz? Because forty thousand deaths and forty-six thousand injuries—spread across a metropolitan area of more than eight million people—means that there were many more remote misses who were emboldened by the experience of being bombed than there were near misses who were traumatized by it.
    “We are all of us not merely liable to fear,” MacCurdy went on.
    We are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, the contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
    In the midst of the Blitz, a middle-aged laborer in a button-factory was asked if he wanted to be evacuated to the countryside. He had been bombed out of his house twice. But each time he and his wife had been fine. He refused.
    “What, and miss all this?” he exclaimed. “Not for all the gold in China! There’s never been nothing like it! Never! And never will be again.”

3.
    The idea of desirable difficulty suggests that not all difficulties are negative. Being a poor reader is a real obstacle, unless you are David Boies and that obstacle turns you into an extraordinary listener, or unless you are Gary Cohn and that obstacle gives you the courage to take chances you would never otherwise have taken.
    MacCurdy’s theory of morale is a second, broader perspective on this same idea. The reason Winston Churchill and the English military brass were so apprehensive about the German attacks on London was that they assumed that a traumatic experience like being bombed would have the same effect on everyone: that the only difference between near misses and remote misses would be the degree of trauma they suffered.
    But to MacCurdy, the Blitz proved that traumatic experiences can have two completely different effects on people: the same event can be profoundly damaging to one group while leaving another better off. That man who worked in a button factory and that young woman whose house was shaken by the bomb were better off for