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

to get it more quickly than I did—and
you tend to focus on those people and
not the ones who are just as lost as you
are.
“I was excited by the material,” he
continued. “But I was humbled by the
experience—humbled as in, you sit in
the class and you don’t understand and
you feel like, ‘I will never be able to
understand this!’ And you do problem
sets and you understand a little bit of this
and a little bit of that, but you always
think that the other people in your class
understand it a lot better. I think one of
the things about Harvard is that there’s
just so many smart people there that it’s
hard to feel smart there.” He decided he