More important than talent: effort can trump ability and conventions are made to be challenged

Annals of InnovationHow David Beats Goliath When underdogs break the rules. by Malcolm Gladwell May 11, 2009
A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it? When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach...he settled on two principles...he would never raise his voice...National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball....mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting...appeals to reason and common sense...second principle was more important. ...basketball...thought it was mindless. ...A basketball court was ninety-four feet long...most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally,...a full-court press...for only a few minutes at a time. ...had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams....Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good? Ranadivé looked at his girls. ...weren’t all that tall...couldn’t shoot....weren’t particularly adept at dribbling....if they played the conventional way...they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion...second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships....
David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact...analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful...the underdog won almost a third of the time....What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”...Consider the way T. E. Lawrence ...led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War....the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built...had amassed a large force in Medina...Lawrence ...realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? ......attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. ...Lawrence’s command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads....“an untrained rabble,...But they were tough and they were mobile.... he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer. “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,”...the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs. ...Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from...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...in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East,...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 did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence’s great insight. 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, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court...Insurgents...operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch 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. ...David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. ...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 girls basketball took advantage of two deadlines in the game)...The first is the inbounds pass....five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court....As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal...second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and ...would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. ...“When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” ...the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’...We would press and steal,...made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”...“What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” ...hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters...hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defense we were getting steals and getting easy layups. ...‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’.......attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. Lawrence extended the battlefield...So did the girls ...defended all ninety-four feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence . . . courage.”“It’s an exhausting strategy,” ...“My girls had to be more fit than the others,” ...“He used to make them run,” ...couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.”... a willingness to try harder than anyone else...In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen....Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy...But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. ...sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won, 87–79.***The counter-tactic is clear but usually isn't employed.***... readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing insurgent basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath.......Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times....The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”...We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination...(being)an outsider. EURISKO But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to...victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage...exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” ...“What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, ...“socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged....This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. 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....When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable...George Washington couldn’t do it. ...He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.”...Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer....And David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd....with a slingshot and staff...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. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said...He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath...brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David....when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins....learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged....