David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog Read online

  Openness

  (inventive/curious versus consistent/cautious)

  Conscientiousness

  (orderly/industrious versus easygoing/careless)

  Agreeableness

  (cooperative/empathic versus self-interested/antagonistic)

  The psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a very particular mix of these traits—particularly the last three: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.

  Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too, is obvious.

  But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, “agreeableness,” they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks—to do things that others might disapprove of.

  That is not easy. Society frowns on disagreeableness. As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention. “If you have a new idea, and it’s disruptive and you’re agreeable, then what are you going to do with that?” says Peterson. “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward.” As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

  A good example of Peterson’s argument is the story of how the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA got its start. The company was founded by Ingvar Kamprad. His great innovation was to realize that much of the cost of furniture was tied up in its assembly: putting the legs on the table not only costs money but also makes shipping the table really expensive. So he sold furniture that hadn’t yet been assembled, shipped it cheaply in flat boxes, and undersold all his competitors.

  In the mid-1950s, however, Kamprad ran into trouble. Swedish furniture manufacturers launched a boycott of IKEA. They were angry at his low prices, and they stopped filling his orders. IKEA faced ruin. Desperate for a solution, Kamprad looked south and realized just across the Baltic Sea from Sweden was Poland, a country with much cheaper labor and plenty of wood. That’s Kamprad’s openness: few companies were outsourcing like that in the early 1960s. Then Kamprad focused his attention on making the Polish connection work. It wasn’t easy. Poland in the 1960s was a mess. It was a Communist country. It had none of the infrastructure or machinery or trained workforce or legal protections of a Western country. But Kamprad pulled it off. “He is a micromanager,” says Anders Åslund, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “That’s why he succeeded where others failed. He went out to these unpleasant places, and made sure things worked. He’s this extremely stubborn character.” That’s conscientiousness.

  But what is the most striking fact about Kamprad’s decision? It’s the year he went to Poland: 1961. The Berlin Wall was going up. The Cold War was at its peak. Within a year, East and West would come to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The equivalent today would be Walmart setting up shop in North Korea. Most people wouldn’t even think of doing business in the land of the enemy for fear of being branded a traitor. Not Kamprad. He didn’t care a whit for what others thought of him. That’s disagreeableness.

  Only a very small number of people have the creativity to think of shipping furniture flat and outsourcing in the face of a boycott. An even smaller number have not only those kinds of insights but also the discipline to build a first-class manufacturing operation in an economic backwater. But to be creative and conscientious and have the strength of mind to defy the Cold War? That’s rare.

  Dyslexia doesn’t necessarily make people more open. Nor does it make them more conscientious (although it certainly might). But the most tantalizing possibility raised by the disorder is that it might make it a little bit easier to be disagreeable.

  6.

  Gary Cohn grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, in northeast Ohio. His family was in the electrical contracting business. This was in the 1970s, at a time before dyslexia was routinely diagnosed. He was held back a year in elementary school because he couldn’t read.6 But, he said, “I didn’t do any better the second time than I did the first time.” He had a discipline problem. “I sort of got expelled from elementary school,” he explained. “I think when you hit the teacher, you get expelled. It was one of those disruptive incidents.…I was being abused. The teacher put me under her desk and rolled her chair in and started kicking me. So I pushed the chair back, hit her in the face, and walked out. I was in fourth grade.”

  He called that period in his life “the ugly years.” His parents didn’t know what to do. “It was probably the most frustrating part of my life, which is saying a lot.” He went on: “Because it wasn’t that I wasn’t trying. I was working really, really hard, and no one understood that part of the equation. They literally thought that I was conscientiously making decisions to be a disruptive kid, to not learn, to hold the class back. You know what it’s like, you’re a six- or seven- or eight-year-old kid, and you’re in a public school setting, and everyone thinks you’re an idiot, so you try to do funny things to try to create some social esteem. You’d try to get up every morning and say, today is going to be better, but after you do that a couple of years, you realize that today is going to be no different than yesterday. And I’m going to have to struggle to get through and I’m going to struggle to survive another day, and we’ll see what happens.”

  His parents took him from school to school, trying to find something that worked. “All my mother wanted me to do was graduate high school,” Cohn said. “I think if you’d asked her, she’d have said, ‘The happiest day of my life will be if he graduates high school. Then he can go drive a truck, but at least he’ll have a high school degree.’” On the day he finally did graduate, Cohn’s mother was a fountain of tears. “I’ve never seen anyone cry so much in my life,” he said.

  When Gary Cohn was twenty-two, he got a job selling aluminum siding and window frames for U.S. Steel in Cleveland. He had just graduated from American University after a middling academic career. One day just before Thanksgiving, while visiting the company’s sales office on Long Island, he persuaded his manager to give him the day off and ventured down to Wall Street. A few summers earlier, he had been an intern at a local brokerage firm and had become interested in trading. He headed to the commodities exchange, which was part of the old World Trade Center complex.

  “I think I’m going to get a job,” he said. “But there’s nowhere to go. It’s all secure. So I go up to the observation deck and watch the guys and think, Can I talk to them? Then I walk down to the floor with the security gate and stand at the security gate, like someone’s going to let me in. Of course no one is. And then literally right after the market’s closed, I see this pretty well-dressed guy running off the floor, yelling to his clerk, ‘I’ve got to go, I’m running to LaGuardia, I’m late, I’ll call you when I get to the airport.’ I jump in the elevator, and I say, ‘I hear you’re going to LaGuardia.’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ I say, ‘Can we share a cab?’ He says, ‘Sure.’ I think this is awesome. With Friday afternoon traffic, I can spend the next hour in the taxi getting a job.”

  The stranger Cohn had jumped into the cab with happened to be high up at one of Wall Street’s big brokerage firms. And just that week, the firm had opened a business buying and selling options.

  “The guy was running the options business but did not know what an option was,” Cohn went on. He was laughing at the sheer audacity of it all. “I lied to him all the way to the airport. When he s
aid, ‘Do you know what an option is?’ I said, ‘Of course I do, I know everything, I can do anything for you.’ Basically by the time we got out of the taxi, I had his number. He said, ‘Call me Monday.’ I called him Monday, flew back to New York Tuesday or Wednesday, had an interview, and started working the next Monday. In that period of time, I read McMillan’s Options as a Strategic Investment book. It’s like the Bible of options trading.”

  It wasn’t easy, of course, since Cohn estimates that on a good day, it takes him six hours to read twenty-two pages.7 He buried himself in the book, working his way through one word at a time, repeating sentences until he was sure he understood them. When he started at work, he was ready. “I literally stood behind him and said, ‘Buy those, sell those, sell those,’” Cohn said. “I never owned up to him what I did. Or maybe he figured it out, but he didn’t care. I made him tons of money.”

  Cohn isn’t ashamed of his beginnings on Wall Street. But it would be a mistake, at the same time, to say that he is proud of them. He is smart enough to know that a story about bluffing your way into your first job isn’t altogether flattering. He told it, instead, in the spirit of honesty. It was This is who I am.

  Cohn was required in that taxi ride to play a role: to pretend to be an experienced options trader when in fact he was not. Most of us would have foundered in that situation. We aren’t used to playing someone other than ourselves. But Cohn had been playing someone other than himself since elementary school. You know what it’s like, you’re a six- or seven- or eight-year-old kid, and you’re in a public school setting, and everyone thinks you’re an idiot, so you try to do funny things to try to create some social esteem. Better to play the clown than to be thought of as an idiot. And if you’ve been pretending to be someone else your whole life, how hard is it to bluff your way through a one-hour cab ride to LaGuardia?

  More important, most of us wouldn’t have jumped in that cab, because we would have worried about the potential social consequences. The Wall Street guy could have seen right through us—and told everyone else on Wall Street that there’s a kid out there posing as an options trader. Where would we be then? We could get tossed out of the cab. We could go home and realize that options trading is over our heads. We could show up on Monday morning and make fools of ourselves. We could get found out, a week or a month later, and get fired. Jumping in the cab was a disagreeable act, and most of us are inclined to be agreeable. But Cohn? He was selling aluminum siding. His mother thought that he would be lucky to end up a truck driver. He had been kicked out of schools and dismissed as an idiot, and, even as an adult, it took him six hours to read twenty-two pages because he had to work his way word by word to make sure he understood what he was reading. He had nothing to lose.

  “My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure,” he said. “The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of the upside than the downside. Because we’re so accustomed to the downside. It doesn’t faze us. I’ve thought about it many times, I really have, because it defined who I am. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my dyslexia. I never would have taken that first chance.”

  Dyslexia—in the best of cases—forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant. It also forces you to do things that you might otherwise never have considered, like doing your own version of Kamprad’s disagreeable trip to Poland or hopping in the cab of someone you’ve never met and pretending to be someone you aren’t. Kamprad, in case you are wondering, is dyslexic. And Gary Cohn? It turns out he was a really good trader, and it turns out that learning how to deal with the possibility of failure is really good preparation for a career in the business world. Today he is the president of Goldman Sachs.

  1 Actually, there’s an even shorter test. One of the most brilliant modern psychologists was a man named Amos Tversky. Tversky was so smart that his fellow psychologists devised the “Tversky Intelligence Test”: The faster you realized Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were. Adam Alter told me about the Tversky test. He would score very highly on it.

  2 To make sure he was measuring intelligence and not something else, Frederick also correlated CRT scores with other factors. “An analysis of these responses shows that CRT scores are unrelated to preferences between apples and oranges, Pepsi and Coke, beer and wine or rap concerts and ballet,” he writes. “However, CRT scores are strongly predictive of the choice between People magazine and The New Yorker. Among the low CRT group, 67 percent preferred People. Among the high CRT group, 64 percent preferred The New Yorker.” (I’m a writer for The New Yorker, so there was no way I wasn’t going to mention this, right?)

  3 When Blankenhorn took the stand in January of 2010, the case was called Perry v. Schwarzenegger; it became Hollingsworth v. Perry at the Supreme Court level in 2013.

  4 Among Grazer’s many films: Splash, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and 8 Mile. He was also mentioned in my book Blink, discussing the art of casting actors.

  5 The “Big Five” is the standard that social psychologists use to measure personality. Social scientists are not always big fans of personality tests like, say, the Myers-Briggs, because they think those “lay” tests overlook key traits or mischaracterize others.

  6 Dyslexia, it should be pointed out, affects only reading. Cohn’s facility with numbers was unaffected. The one person who believed in him throughout his childhood, Cohn says, was his grandfather, and it was because his grandfather realized that young Gary had committed the entire inventory of the family’s plumbing supplies business to memory.

  7 This chapter is about that long. If Gary Cohn wants to read about himself, he will have to sit down and clear a substantial space on his schedule. “To really understand it, read it, comprehend it, look up all the words I didn’t know, look up the word and realize, oh, that’s not the word, I’m looking it up wrong, that’s two hours for three days in a row,” he said. He’s a busy man. That’s unlikely to happen. “Good luck with your book I’m not going to read,” he said, laughing, at the end of our interview.

  Chapter Five

  Emil “Jay” Freireich

  “How Jay did it, I don’t know.”

  1.

  When Jay Freireich was very young, his father died suddenly. The Freireichs were Hungarian immigrants who were running a restaurant in Chicago. It was just after the stock market crash in 1929. They lost everything. “They found him in the bathroom,” Freireich said. “I think it was suicide, because he felt all alone. He had come to Chicago because he had a brother there. When the crash occurred, the brother left town. He had a wife, two small children, no money, a restaurant gone. He must have been pretty desperate.”

  Freireich’s mother went to work in a sweatshop, sewing brims on hats. She made two cents a hat. She didn’t speak much English. “She had to work eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, to make enough money to have an apartment for us to rent,” Freireich went on. “We never saw her. We had a little apartment on the west side of Humboldt Park, bordering the ghetto. She couldn’t leave a two-year-old and a five-year-old all alone, so she found an immigrant Irish lady who worked for room and board. My parent, from the age of two, was this Irish maid. We loved her. She was my mother. Then, when I was nine, my mother met a Hungarian man who had lost his wife and had one son, and she married him. It was a marriage of convenience. He couldn’t take care of his son by himself, and she didn’t have anybody. He was a really bitter, shriveled guy. So they got married and my mother left the sweatshop and appeared back on the scene, and they couldn’t afford the maid anymore. So they fired her. They fired my mother. I never forgave my mother for that.”

  The family moved from one apartment to another. They had protein one day a week. Freireich remembers being sent from store to store looking for a bottle of milk for four cents, because the normal price of five cents was more than the family co
uld afford. He spent his days on the street. He stole. He wasn’t close to his sister. She was more disciplinarian than friend. He didn’t like his stepfather. In any case, the marriage didn’t last. He didn’t like his mother either. “Whatever mind she had was destroyed in the sweatshops,” he said. “She was an angry person. And when she married this ugly guy, who brought this person in—my half brother—who got half of everything I used to get, and then she fired my mother…” His voice trailed off.

  Freireich was sitting at his desk. He was wearing a white coat. Everything he was talking about was both long ago and—in another, more important sense—not long ago at all. “I can’t remember her ever hugging or kissing me or anything like that,” he said. “She never talked about my father. I have no idea whether he was nice to her or mean. I never heard a word. Do I ever think about what he might have been like? All the time. I have one picture.” Freireich turned in his chair and clicked on a file of pictures on his computer. Up came a grainy early-twentieth-century photograph of a man who, not surprisingly, looked a lot like Freireich himself. “That’s the only picture of him my mother ever had,” he said. The edges of the photo were uneven. It had been cropped from a much larger family photograph.

  I asked about the Irish maid who raised him. What was her name? He stopped short—a rare pause for him. “I don’t know,” he said. “It will pop into my head, I’m sure.” He sat still for a moment and concentrated. “My sister would remember, my mother would remember. But they are no longer alive. I have no living relatives—just two cousins.” He paused again. “I want to call her Mary. And that may actually be her name. But my mother’s name was Mary. So I may be confusing it…”

  Freireich was eighty-four years old when we talked. But it would be a mistake to call this an age-related memory lapse. Jay Freireich does not have memory lapses. I interviewed him for the first time one spring and then again six months later, and again after that, and every time, he would recall dates and names and facts with clocklike precision, and if he went over the same ground as he had on some previous occasion, he would stop himself and say, “I know I said this to you before.” He could not retrieve the name of the woman who raised him because everything from those years was so painful that it had been pushed to the furthest recesses of his mind.