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

of billions of new dollars spent on hiring those extra teachers. It’s safe to say that there isn’t a single profession in the world that has increased its numbers over the past two decades by as much or as quickly or at such expense as teaching has. One country after another has spent that kind of money because we look at a school like Shepaug Valley—where every teacher has a chance to get to know every student—and we think, “There’s the place to send my child.” But the evidence suggests that the thing we are convinced is such a big advantage might not be such an advantage at all. 1

3.
    Not long ago, I sat down with one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. He began by talking about his childhood in Minneapolis. He would go up and down the streets of his neighborhood at the beginning of every winter, he said, getting commitments from people who wanted their driveways and sidewalks cleared of snow. Then he would contract out each job to other children in the neighborhood. He paid his workers the moment the job was done, with cash on hand, and collected from the families later because he learned that was the surest way to get his crew to work hard. He had eight, sometimes nine, kids on the payroll. In the fall, he would switch to raking leaves.
    “I would go and check their work so I could tell the customer that their driveway would be done the way they wanted it done,” he remembered. “There would always be one or two kids who didn’t do it well, and I would have to fire them.” He was ten years old. By the age of eleven, he had six hundred dollars in the bank, all earned by himself. This was in the 1950s. That would be the equivalent today of five thousand dollars. “I didn’t have money for where I wanted to go,” he said with a shrug, as if it was obvious that an eleven-year-old would have a sense of where he wanted to go. “Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.”
    His family lived in what people euphemistically called a “mixed neighborhood.” He went to public schools and wore hand-me-downs. His father was a product of the Depression, and talked plainly about money. The man from Hollywood said that if he wanted something—a new pair of running shoes, say, or a bicycle—his father would tell him he had to pay half. If he left the lights on, his father would show him the electric bill. “He’d say, ‘Look, this is what we pay for electricity. You’re just being lazy, not turning the lights off. We’re paying for you being lazy. But if you need lights for working—twenty-four hours a day—no problem.’”
    The summer of his sixteenth year, he went to work at his father’s scrap-metal business. It was hard, physical labor. He was treated like any other employee. “It made me not want to live in Minneapolis,” he said. “It made me never want to depend on working for my father. It was awful. It was dirty. It was hard. It was boring. It was putting scrap metal in barrels. I worked there from May fifteenth through Labor Day. I couldn’t get the dirt off me. I think, looking back, my father wanted me to work there because he knew that if I worked there, I would want to escape. I would be motivated to do something more.”
    In college he ran a laundry service, picking up and delivering dry cleaning for his wealthy classmates. He organized student charter flights to Europe. He went to see basketball games with his friend and sat in terrible seats—obstructed by a pillar—and wondered what it would be like to sit in the premium seats courtside. He went to business school and law school in New York, and lived in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn to save money. After graduation, he got a job in Hollywood, which led to a bigger job, and then to an even bigger job, and side deals and prizes and a string of extraordinary successes—to the point where he now has a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar, his own jet, a Ferrari in the garage, and a gate in front of his seemingly never-ending driveway that looks like it was shipped over from some medieval castle in Europe. He understood money. And he understood money because he felt he had been given a thorough education in its value and function back home on the streets of Minneapolis.
    “I wanted to have more freedom. I wanted to aspire to have different things. Money was a tool that I could use for my aspiration and my desires and my