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Teresa DeBrito
David Boies is one of the United States’ most successful litigators. As a child, Boies struggles to learn to read because he has dyslexia. After graduating high school, he works as a construction worker before deciding to become a lawyer and attending a community college, where he excels because he’s quite smart despite his learning disability. Boies then attends law school, eventually transferring to Yale to complete his degree. Although he still has trouble reading, he has developed incredible listening skills because he’s always had to compensate for his struggle to make words out on the page. This ends up benefitting him in law school, since he can absorb so much of what his professors say during lectures. He also puts this skill to good use in the courtroom, managing to pick up on important subtleties when cross-examining people. Gladwell uses Boies’s story to illustrate the idea of “desirable difficulty,” which upholds that some challenges are productive because they force people to find new ways to excel.
David Boies Quotes in David and Goliath
The David and Goliath quotes below are all either spoken by David Boies or refer to David Boies. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4: David Boies
Quotes
Most of the learning that we do is capitalization learning. It is easy and obvious. If you have a beautiful voice and perfect pitch, it doesn’t take much to get you to join a choir. “Compensation learning,” on the other hand, is really hard. Memorizing what your mother says while she reads to you and then reproducing the words later in such a way that it sounds convincing to all those around you requires that you confront your limitations. It requires that you overcome your insecurity and humiliation. It requires that you focus hard enough to memorize the words, and then have the panache to put on a successful performance. Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire David and Goliath LitChart as a printable PDF.
David Boies Quotes in David and Goliath
The David and Goliath quotes below are all either spoken by David Boies or refer to David Boies. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4: David Boies
Quotes
Most of the learning that we do is capitalization learning. It is easy and obvious. If you have a beautiful voice and perfect pitch, it doesn’t take much to get you to join a choir. “Compensation learning,” on the other hand, is really hard. Memorizing what your mother says while she reads to you and then reproducing the words later in such a way that it sounds convincing to all those around you requires that you confront your limitations. It requires that you overcome your insecurity and humiliation. It requires that you focus hard enough to memorize the words, and then have the panache to put on a successful performance. Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
