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

on April 3, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Daiji on April 4 and 5, and attacked twice on April 6.
    Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that, he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom about one stage in the journey:
    We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster, and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.
    When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks and lost only two men. The Turks simply had not thought that their opponent would be crazy enough to come at them from the desert.
    Sir Reginald Wingate called Lawrence’s men an “untrained rabble.” He saw the Turks as the overwhelming favorites. But can you see how strange that was? Having lots of soldiers and weapons and resources—as the Turks did—is an advantage. But it makes you immobile and puts you on the defensive. Meanwhile, movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, and courage—which Lawrence’s men had in abundance—allowed them to do the impossible, namely, attack Aqaba from the east, a strategy so audacious that the Turks never saw it coming. There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources—and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.
    For some reason, this is a very difficult lesson for us to learn. We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. Part One of David and Goliath is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error. When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning? And what does it take to be that person who doesn’t accept the conventional order of things as a given—like David, or Lawrence of Arabia, or, for that matter, Vivek Ranadivé and his band of nerdy Silicon Valley girls?

3.
    Vivek Ranadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a couple of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, a former professional athlete who worked for Ranadivé’s software company. 1 After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who had played basketball in college. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to render her useless. The girls on the team loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”
    Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the time allotted for the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out-of-bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually that’s not an issue, because teams don’t hang around to defend against the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not do that. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her