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

We’re paying for you being lazy. But if
you need lights for working—twenty-
four hours a day—no problem.’”
The summer of his sixteenth year, he
went to work at his father’s scrap-metal
business. It was hard, physical labor. He
was treated like any other employee. “It
made me not want to live in
Minneapolis,” he said. “It made me
never want to depend on working for my
father. It was awful. It was dirty. It was
hard. It was boring. It was putting scrap
metal in barrels. I worked there from
May fifteenth through Labor Day. I
couldn’t get the dirt off me. I think,
looking back, my father wanted me to
work there because he knew that if I
worked there, I would want to escape. I