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

successful businesspeople—and on a
whim asking how many of them had ever
been diagnosed with a learning disorder.
“Half the hands went up,” she said. “It
was unbelievable.”
There are two possible interpretations
for this fact. One is that this remarkable
group of people triumphed in spite of
their disability: they are so smart and so
creative that nothing—not even a
lifetime of struggling with reading—
could stop them. The second, more
intriguing, possibility is that they
succeeded, in part, because of their
disorder—that they learned something in
their struggle that proved to be of
enormous advantage. Would you wish
dyslexia on your child? If the second of