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

and on and on, in a virtuous circle.
That’s “capitalization learning”: we get
good at something by building on the
strengths that we are naturally given.
But desirable difficulties have the
opposite logic. In their CRT
experiments, Alter and Oppenheimer
made students excel by making their
lives harder, by forcing them to
compensate for something that had been
taken away from them. That’s what
Boies was doing as well when he
learned to listen. He was compensating.
He had no choice. He was such a
terrible reader that he had to scramble
and adapt and come up with some kind
of strategy that allowed him to keep pace
with everyone around him.