David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability--and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.
Underdog insurgents operate in real time.
Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) lead the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.
Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak--the railroad--and not where they were strong, Medina. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch of railroad in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance--and endurance battles favor the insurgent. Just as it did David against Goliath many years before.
"And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine," the Bible says. "And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead." The second sentence--the slingshot part--is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much.
David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up.
"The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target," the poet and critic robert Pinsky writes in "The Life of David." Pinsky calls David a "point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there." David pressed. That's what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.
The underdog insurgents win because they have the greater will to win and have forced themselves to be more fit than their opponents. This winning philosophy is based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else. Yet, relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of conventional coordination.
The second half of the insurgent's creed is that underdog insurgents work harder than Goliath.
But their other advantage is that they will do what is "socially horrifying"--they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coordination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable--a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually compenent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment to have the audacity to play it that way.
T. E. Lawrence was the fartest thing from a proper British Army officer. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he when to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic lake a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. And David was a sheperd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn't know that duels with Philistines were suposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. "When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches," David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd's rules to the battlefield.
The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. But let's remember why insiders make the rules: when the world has to play on Goliath's terms, Goliath wins.
Source: "How David Beats Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell in THE NEW YORKER, May 8, 2009