1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
What"s your instinctive response? I"m guessing that it is that the ball must cost 10 cents. That can"t be right, though, can it? The bat is supposed to cost $1.00 more than the ball. So if the ball costs 10 cents, the bat must cost $1.10, and we"ve exceeded our total. The right answer must be that the ball costs 5 cents.
Here"s another question: 2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
The setup of the question tempts you to answer 100. But it"s a trick. One hundred machines take exactly the same amount of time to make 100 widgets as 5 machines take to make 5 widgets. The right answer is 5 minutes.
These puzzles are two of the three questions that make up the world"s shortest intelligence test.1 It"s called the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). It was invented by the Yale professor Shane Frederick, and it measures your ability to understand when something is more complex than it appears-to move past impulsive answers to deeper, a.n.a.lytic judgments.
Frederick argues that if you want a quick way to sort people according to their level of basic cognitive ability, his little test is almost as useful as tests that have hundreds of items and take several hours to finish. To prove his point, Frederick gave the CRT to students at nine American colleges, and the results track pretty closely with how students from those colleges would rank on more traditional intelligence tests.2 Students from the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology-perhaps the brainiest college in the world-averaged 2.18 correct answers out of three. Students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, another extraordinarily elite inst.i.tution, averaged 1.51 right answers out of three. Harvard students scored 1.43; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1.18; and the University of Toledo 0.57.
The CRT is really hard. But here"s the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise people"s scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder. The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That"s pretty good, though it is well short of the 2.18 that MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read-a 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font-so that it looked like this: 1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The average score this time around? 2.45. Suddenly, the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.
That"s strange, isn"t it? Normally we think that we are better at solving problems when they are presented clearly and simply. But here the opposite happened. A 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font makes reading really frustrating. You have to squint a little bit and maybe read the sentence twice, and you probably wonder halfway through who on earth thought it was a good idea to print out the test this way. Suddenly you have to work to read the question.
Yet all that extra effort pays off. As Alter says, making the questions "disfluent" causes people to "think more deeply about whatever they come across. They"ll use more resources on it. They"ll process more deeply or think more carefully about what"s going on. If they have to overcome a hurdle, they"ll overcome it better when you force them to think a little harder." Alter and Oppenheimer made the CRT more difficult. But that difficulty turned out to be desirable.
Not all difficulties have a silver lining, of course. What Caroline Sacks went through, in her organic chemistry cla.s.s at Brown was an undesirable difficulty. She is a curious, hardworking, talented student who loves science-and there was no advantage to putting her in a situation where she felt demoralized and inadequate. The struggle did not give her a new appreciation of science. It scared her away from science. But there are times and places where struggles have the opposite effect-where what seems like the kind of obstacle that ought to cripple an underdog"s chances is actually like Alter and Oppenheimer"s Myriad Pro 10 percent gray, 10-point italics font.
Can dyslexia turn out to be a desirable difficulty? It is hard to believe that it can, given how many people struggle with the disorder throughout their lives-except for a strange fact. An extraordinarily high number of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. A recent study by Julie Logan at City University London puts the number somewhere around a third. The list includes many of the most famous innovators of the past few decades. Richard Branson, the British billionaire entrepreneur, is dyslexic. Charles Schwab, the founder of the discount brokerage that bears his name, is dyslexic, as are the cell phone pioneer Craig McCaw; David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue; John Chambers, the CEO of the technology giant Cisco; Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko"s-to name just a few. The neuroscientist Sharon Thompson-Schill remembers speaking at a meeting of prominent university donors-virtually all of them 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 these possibilities is true, you just might.
David Boies grew up in farming country in rural Illinois. He was the eldest of five. His parents were public school teachers. His mother would read to him when he was young. He would memorize what she said because he couldn"t follow what was on the page. He didn"t begin to read until the third grade, and then did so only slowly and with great difficulty. Many years later, he would realize that he had dyslexia. But at the time, he didn"t think he had a problem. His little town in rural Illinois wasn"t a place that regarded reading well as some crucial badge of achievement. Many of his schoolmates quit school to work on the farm the first chance they got. Boies read comic books, which were easy to follow and had lots of pictures. He never read for fun. Even today, he might read one book a year, if that. He watches television-anything, he says with a laugh, "that moves and is in color." His speaking vocabulary is limited. He uses small words and short sentences. Sometimes if he"s reading something out loud and runs into a word he doesn"t know, he will stop and spell it out slowly. "My wife gave me an iPad a year and a half ago, which was my first computer-like device, and one of the things that was interesting is that my attempt to spell many words is not close enough for spell-check to find the correct spelling," Boies says. "I can"t tell you how many times I get the little message that says, "No spelling suggestions.""
When Boies graduated from high school, he didn"t have any great ambitions. His grades had been "ragged." His family had moved to Southern California by then, and the local economy was booming. He got a job in construction. "It was outside work, with older guys," Boies remembers. "I was making more money than I could ever have imagined. It was a lot of fun." After that, he worked for a while as a bookkeeper in a bank while playing a lot of bridge on the side. "It was a great life. I could have gone on like that for a while. But after our first child was born, my wife became increasingly serious-minded about my future." She brought home brochures and pamphlets from local colleges and universities. He remembered a childhood fascination with the law and decided that he would go to law school. Today David Boies is one of the most famous trial lawyers in the world.
How Boies went from a construction worker with a high school education to the top of the legal profession is a puzzle, to say the least. The law is built around reading-around cases and opinions and scholarly a.n.a.lyses-and Boies is someone for whom reading is a struggle. It seems crazy that he would even have considered the law. But let"s not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader-and that means you"ve probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypa.s.ses that exist to get around reading.
Boies started college at the University of Redlands, a small private university an hour east of Los Angeles. Going there was his first break. Redlands was a Small Pond. Boies excelled there. He worked hard and was very well organized-because he knew he had to be. Then he got lucky. Redlands required a number of core courses for graduation, all of which involved heavy reading requirements. In those years, however, one could apply to law school without completing an undergraduate degree. Boies simply skipped the core courses. "I remember when I found out I could go to law school without graduating," he says. "It was so great. I couldn"t believe it."
Law school, of course, required even more reading. But Boies discovered that there were summaries of the major cases-guides that would boil down the key point of a long Supreme Court opinion to a page or so. "People might tell you that"s an undesirable way to do law school," he says. "But it was functional." Plus, he was a good listener. "Listening," he says, "is something I"ve been doing essentially all my life. I learned to do it because that was the only way that I could learn. I remember what people say. I remember words they use." So he would sit in cla.s.s at law school-while everyone else furiously made notes or doodled or lapsed into daydreams or faded in and out-focusing on what was said and committing what he heard to memory. His memory by that point was a formidable instrument. He had been exercising it, after all, ever since his mother read to him as a child and he memorized what she said. His fellow students, as they made notes and doodled and faded in and out, missed things. Their attention was compromised. Boies didn"t have that problem. He might not have been a reader, but the things he was forced to do because he could not read well turned out to be even more valuable. He started out at Northwestern Law School, then he transferred to Yale.
When Boies became a lawyer, he did not choose to practice corporate law. That would have been foolish. Corporate lawyers need to work their way through mountains of doc.u.ments and appreciate the significance of the minor footnote on page 367. He became a litigator, a job that required him to think on his feet. He memorizes what he needs to say. Sometimes in court he stumbles when he has to read something and comes across a word that he cannot process in time. So he stops and spells it out, like a child in a spelling bee. It"s awkward. It"s more of an eccentricity, though, than an actual problem. In the 1990s, he headed the prosecution team accusing Microsoft of ant.i.trust violations, and during the trial, he kept referring to "login" as "lojin," which is just the kind of mistake a dyslexic makes. But he was devastating in the cross-examination of witnesses, because there was no nuance, no subtle evasion, no peculiar and telling choice of words that he would miss-and no stray comment or revealing admission from testimony an hour or a day or a week before that he would not have heard, registered, and remembered.
"If I could read a lot faster, it would make a lot of things that I do easier," Boies said. "There"s no doubt about that. But on the other hand, not being able to read a lot and learning by listening and asking questions means that I need to simplify issues to their basics. And that is very powerful, because in trial cases, judges and jurors-neither of them have the time or the ability to become an expert in the subject. One of my strengths is presenting a case that they can understand." His opponents tend to be scholarly types, who have read every conceivable a.n.a.lysis of the issue at hand. Time and again, they get bogged down in excessive detail. Boies doesn"t.
One of his most famous cases-Hollingsworth v. Schwarzenegger3-involved a California law limiting marriage to a man and woman. Boies was the attorney arguing that the law was unconst.i.tutional, and in the trial"s most memorable exchange, Boies destroyed the other side"s key expert witness, David Blankenhorn, getting him to concede huge chunks of Boies"s case.
"One of the things you tell a witness when you"re preparing them is take your time," Boies said. "Even when you don"t need to. Because there will be some times when you need to slow down, and you don"t want to show the examiner by your change of pace that this is something that you need time on. So-when were you born?" He spoke carefully and deliberately. ""It...was...1941." You don"t say, "ItwasMarcheleventh1941atsix-thirtyinthemorning," even though you"re not trying to hide it. You want your response to be the same for the easy things as for the harder things so that you don"t reveal what"s easy and what"s hard by the way you answer."
When Blankenhorn paused just a bit too much in certain crucial moments, Boies caught it. "It was tone and pace and the words he used. Some of it comes from pauses. He"d slow down when he was trying to think of how to phrase something. He was somebody who as you probed him and listened to him, you could hear areas where he was uncomfortable-where he would use an obscuring word. And by being able to zero in on those areas, I was able to get him to admit the key elements of our case."
Boies has a particular skill that helps to explain why he is so good at what he does. He"s a superb listener. But think about how he came to develop that skill. Most of us gravitate naturally toward the areas where we excel. The child who picks up reading easily goes on to read even more and becomes even better at it, and ends up in a field that requires a lot of reading. A young boy named Tiger Woods is unusually coordinated for his age and finds that the game of golf suits his imagination, and so he likes to practice golf. And because he likes to practice so much, he gets even better, 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.
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.
It is striking how often successful dyslexics tell versions of this same compensation story. "It was horrible to be in school," a man named Brian Grazer told me. "My body chemistry would always change. I would be anxious, really anxious. It would take forever to do a simple homework a.s.signment. I would spend hours daydreaming because I couldn"t really read the words. You"d find yourself sitting in one place for an hour and a half accomplishing nothing. Through seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grade, I was getting mostly Fs, with an occasional D and maybe a C. I was only pa.s.sing because my mom wouldn"t let them put me back."
So how did Grazer get through school? Before any test or exam, he would start to plan and strategize, even in elementary school. "I would get together with someone the night before," he said. "What are you going to do? How do you think you will answer these questions? I"d try and guess the questions, or if there was a way to get the questions or the tests beforehand, I would."
By the time he hit high school, he"d developed a better strategy. "I challenged all my grades," he went on, "which meant that literally every time I got my grade in high school, after the report cards came out, I would go back to each teacher and do a one-on-one. I would argue my D into a C and my C into a B. And almost every time-ninety percent of the time-I got my grade changed. I would just wear them down. I got really good at it. I got confident. In college, I would study, knowing that I was going to have this hour-long meeting afterward with my professor. I learned how to do everything possible to sell my point. It was really good training."
All good parents try to teach their children the art of persuasion, of course. But a normal, well-adjusted child has no need to take those lessons seriously. If you get As in school, you never need to figure out how to negotiate your way to a pa.s.sing grade, or to look around the room as a nine-year-old and start strategizing about how to make it through the next hour. But when Grazer practiced negotiation, just as when Boies practiced listening, he had a gun to his head. He practiced day in, day out, year after year. When Grazer said that was "really good training," what he meant was learning to talk his way from a position of weakness to a position of strength turned out to be the perfect preparation for the profession he ended up in. Grazer is now one of the most successful movie producers in Hollywood of the past thirty years.4 Would Brian Grazer be where he is if he weren"t a dyslexic?
Let"s dig a little deeper into this strange a.s.sociation between what is essentially a neurological malfunction and career success. In the Big Pond chapter, I talked about the fact that being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests. Caroline Sacks would have had a better chance of practicing the profession she loved if she had gone to her second-choice school instead of her first choice. Impressionism, similarly, was possible only in the tiny gallery that virtually no one went to, not in the most prestigious art show on earth.
Dyslexics are outsiders as well. They are forced to stand apart from everyone else at school because they can"t do the thing that school requires them to do. Is it possible for that "outsiderness" to give them some kind of advantage down the line? To answer that question, it is worth thinking about the kind of personality that characterizes innovators and entrepreneurs.
Psychologists measure personality through what is called the Five Factor Model, or "Big Five" inventory, which a.s.sesses who we are across the following dimensions.5 Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous versus secure/confident) Extraversion (energetic/gregarious versus solitary/reserved) 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 a.s.sembly: 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 a.s.sembled, shipped it cheaply in flat boxes, and undersold all his compet.i.tors.
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 slund, a fellow at the Peterson Inst.i.tute 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-cla.s.s 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.
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 cla.s.s 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 said, "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 a.n.a.lysis of these responses shows that CRT scores are unrelated to preferences between apples and oranges, Pepsi and c.o.ke, 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 s.p.a.ce 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."
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 could 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.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, the British government was worried. If, in the event of war, the German Air Force launched a major air offensive against London, the British military command believed that there was nothing they could do to stop it. Basil Liddell Hart, one of the foremost military theorists of the day, estimated that in the first week of any German attack, London could see a quarter of a million civilian deaths and injuries. Winston Churchill described London as "the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow, tied up to attract the beast of prey." He predicted that the city would be so helpless in the face of attack that between three and four million Londoners would flee to the countryside. In 1937, on the eve of the war, the British military command issued a report with the direst prediction of all: a sustained German bombing attack would leave six hundred thousand dead and 1.2 million wounded and create ma.s.s panic in the streets. People would refuse to go to work. Industrial production would grind to a halt. The army would be useless against the Germans because it would be preoccupied with keeping order among the millions of panicked civilians. The country"s planners briefly considered building a ma.s.sive network of underground bomb shelters across London, but they abandoned the plan out of a fear that if they did, the people who took refuge there would never come out. They set up several psychiatric hospitals just outside the city limits to handle what they expected would be a flood of psychological casualties. "There is every chance," the report stated, "that this could cost us the war."
In the fall of 1940, the long-antic.i.p.ated attack began. Over a period of eight months-beginning with fifty-seven consecutive nights of devastating bombardment-German bombers thundered across the skies above London, dropping tens of thousands of high-explosive bombs and more than a million incendiary devices. Forty thousand people were killed, and another forty-six thousand were injured. A million buildings were damaged or destroyed. In the city"s East End, entire neighborhoods were laid waste. It was everything the British government officials had feared-except that every one of their predictions about how Londoners would react turned out to be wrong.
The panic never came. The psychiatric hospitals built on the outskirts of London were switched over to military use because no one showed up. Many women and children were evacuated to the countryside as the bombing started. But people who needed to stay in the city by and large stayed. As the Blitz continued, as the German a.s.saults grew heavier and heavier, the British authorities began to observe-to their astonishment-not just courage in the face of the bombing but something closer to indifference. "In October 1940 I had occasion to drive through South-East London just after a series of attacks on that district," one English psychiatrist wrote just after the war ended: Every hundred yards or so, it seemed, there was a bomb crater or wreckage of what had once been a house or shop. The siren blew its warning and I looked to see what would happen. A nun seized the hand of a child she was escorting and hurried on. She and I seemed to be the only ones who had heard the warning. Small boys continued to play all over the pavements, shoppers went on haggling, a policeman directed traffic in majestic boredom and the bicyclists defied death and the traffic laws. No one, so far as I could see, even looked into the sky.
I think you"ll agree this is hard to believe. The Blitz was war. The exploding bombs sent deadly shrapnel flying in every direction. The incendiaries left a different neighborhood in flames every night. More than a million people lost their homes. Thousands crammed into makeshift shelters in subway stations every night. Outside, between the thunder of planes overhead, the thud of explosions, the rattle of anti-aircraft guns, and the endless wails of ambulances, fire engines, and warning sirens, the noise was unrelenting. In one survey of Londoners, on the night of September 12, 1940, a third said that they had gotten no sleep the night before, and another third said they got fewer than four hours. Can you imagine how New Yorkers would have reacted if one of their office towers had been reduced to rubble not just once but every night for two and a half months?
The typical explanation for the reaction of Londoners is the British "stiff upper lip"-the stoicism said to be inherent in the English character. (Not surprisingly, this is the explanation most favored by the British themselves.) But one of the things that soon became clear was that it wasn"t just the British who behaved this way. Civilians from other countries also turned out to be unexpectedly resilient in the face of bombing. Bombing, it became clear, didn"t have the effect that everyone had thought it would have. It wasn"t until the end of the war that the puzzle was solved by the Canadian psychiatrist J. T. MacCurdy, in a book called The Structure of Morale.
MacCurdy argued that when a bomb falls, it divides the affected population into three groups. The first group is the people killed. They are the ones for whom the experience of the bombing is-obviously-the most devastating. But as MacCurdy pointed out (perhaps a bit callously), "the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors, so from that point of view, the killed do not matter. Put this way the fact is obvious, corpses do not run about spreading panic."
The next group he called the near misses: They feel the blast, they see the destruction, are horrified by the carnage, perhaps they are wounded, but they survive deeply impressed. "Impression" means, here, a powerful reinforcement of the fear reaction in a.s.sociation with bombing. It may result in "shock," a loose term that covers anything from a dazed state or actual stupor to jumpiness and preoccupation with the horrors that have been witnessed.
Third, he said, are the remote misses. These are the people who listen to the sirens, watch the enemy bombers overhead, and hear the thunder of the exploding bombs. But the bomb hits down the street or the next block over. And for them, the consequences of a bombing attack are exactly the opposite of the near-miss group. They survived, and the second or third time that happens, the emotion a.s.sociated with the attack, MacCurdy wrote, "is a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability." A near miss leaves you traumatized. A remote miss makes you think you are invincible.
In diaries and recollections of Londoners who lived through the Blitz, there are countless examples of this phenomenon. Here is one: When the first siren sounded I took my children to our dug-out in the garden and I was quite certain we were all going to be killed. Then the all-clear went without anything having happened. Ever since we came out of the dug-out I have felt sure nothing would ever hurt us.
Or consider this, from the diary of a young woman whose house was shaken by a nearby explosion: I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. "I"ve been bombed!" I kept on saying to myself, over and over again-trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. "I"ve been bombed!...I"ve been bombed-me!"
It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people were killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.
So why were Londoners so unfazed by the Blitz? Because forty thousand deaths and forty-six thousand injuries-spread across a metropolitan area of more than eight million people-means that there were many more remote misses who were emboldened by the experience of being bombed than there were near misses who were traumatized by it.
"We are all of us not merely liable to fear," MacCurdy went on.
We are also p.r.o.ne to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration....When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, the contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
In the midst of the Blitz, a middle-aged laborer in a b.u.t.ton-factory was asked if he wanted to be evacuated to the countryside. He had been bombed out of his house twice. But each time he and his wife had been fine. He refused.
"What, and miss all this?" he exclaimed. "Not for all the gold in China! There"s never been nothing like it! Never! And never will be again."
The idea of desirable difficulty suggests that not all difficulties are negative. Being a poor reader is a real obstacle, unless you are David Boies and that obstacle turns you into an extraordinary listener, or unless you are Gary Cohn and that obstacle gives you the courage to take chances you would never otherwise have taken.
MacCurdy"s theory of morale is a second, broader perspective on this same idea. The reason Winston Churchill and the English military bra.s.s were so apprehensive about the German attacks on London was that they a.s.sumed that a traumatic experience like being bombed would have the same effect on everyone: that the only difference between near misses and remote misses would be the degree of trauma they suffered.
But to MacCurdy, the Blitz proved that traumatic experiences can have two completely different effects on people: the same event can be profoundly damaging to one group while leaving another better off. That man who worked in a b.u.t.ton factory and that young woman whose house was shaken by the bomb were better off for their experience, weren"t they? They were in the middle of a war. They couldn"t change that fact. But they were freed of the kinds of fears that can make life during wartime unendurable.
Dyslexia is a cla.s.sic example of this same phenomenon. Many people with dyslexia don"t manage to compensate for their disability. There are a remarkable number of dyslexics in prison, for example: these are people who have been overwhelmed by their failure at mastering the most basic of academic tasks. Yet this same neurological disorder in people like Gary Cohn and David Boies can also have the opposite effect. Dyslexia blew a hole in Cohn"s life-leaving a trail of misery and anxiety. But he was very bright, and he had a supportive family and more than a little luck and enough other resources that he was able to weather the worst effects of the blast and emerge stronger. Too often, we make the same mistake as the British did and jump to the conclusion that there is only one kind of response to something terrible and traumatic. There isn"t. There are two-which brings us back to Jay Freireich and the childhood he could not allow himself to remember.
When Jay Freireich was nine years old, he contracted tonsillitis. He was very sick. The local physician-Dr. Rosenbloom-came to his family"s apartment to remove his inflamed tonsils. "I never saw a man in those years," Freireich said. "Everyone I knew was a woman. If you saw a man, he was dirty and in overalls. But Rosenbloom-he had a suit and tie and he was dignified and kind. So from the age of ten I used to dream about becoming a famous doctor. I never thought of any other career."
In high school, his physics teacher took a shine to him and told him he should go to college. "I said, "What do I need?" He said, "Well, probably if you get twenty-five dollars, I think you can make it." It was 1942. Things were better. But people still weren"t very well off. Twenty-five dollars wasn"t small stuff. I don"t think my mother had ever seen twenty-five dollars. She said, "Well, let me see what I can do." A couple of days later, she appeared. She had found a Hungarian lady whose husband died and left her money, and believe it or not, she gave my mother twenty-five dollars. Instead of keeping it, my mother gave it to me. So here I am. I"m sixteen years old. And I"m very optimistic."
Freireich took the train from Chicago to Champaign-Urbana, where the University of Illinois was located. He rented a bedroom in a rooming house. He got a job waiting tables in a sorority house to pay his tuition, with the added bonus that he could feed himself from the leftovers. He did well and was accepted to medical school, after which he began his internship at Cook County Hospital, the major public hospital in Chicago.
Medicine in those years was a genteel profession. Doctors held a privileged social position and typically came from upper-middle-cla.s.s backgrounds. Freireich was not like that. Even today, in his eighties, Freireich is an intimidating man, six foot four and thick through the chest and shoulders. His head is oversize-even for a body as large as his-making him seem bigger still. He is a talker, fluent and relentless and loud, his voice inflected with the hard vowels of his native Chicago. In moments of special emphasis, he has the habit of shouting and pounding the table with his fist-which, memorably, once resulted in his shattering a gla.s.s conference table. (The immediate aftermath was later described as the only time anyone had ever seen Freireich silenced.) At one point, he dated a woman from a much more affluent family than his. She was refined and sophisticated. Freireich was a bruiser from Humboldt Park who looked and sounded like the muscle for some Depression-era gangster. "She took me to the symphony. It was the first time I"d ever heard cla.s.sical music," he remembered. "I"d never seen a ballet. I"d never seen a play. Outside of our little TV that my mother purchased, I had no education to speak of. There was no literature, no art, no music, no dance, no nothing. It was just food. And not getting killed or beaten up. I was pretty raw."1 Freireich was a research a.s.sociate in hematology in Boston. From there, he was drafted into the army and chose to complete his military service at the National Cancer Inst.i.tute, just outside Washington, DC. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant and dedicated physician, the first at the hospital in the morning and the last to leave. But he remained never more than a step away from his tumultuous beginnings. He had a volcanic temper. He had no patience, no gentleness. One colleague remembers his unforgettable first impression of Freireich: "a giant, in the back of the room, yelling and screaming on the phone." Another remembers him as "completely irrepressible. He would say whatever came into his mind." Over the course of his career, he would end up being fired seven times, the first time during his residency when he angrily defied the head nurse at Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago. One of his former coworkers remembers Freireich coming across a routine error made by one of his medical residents. A minor laboratory finding had been overlooked. "The patient died," the doctor said. "It wasn"t because of the error. Jay screamed at him right there in the ward, in front of five or six doctors and nurses. He called him a murderer, and the guy broke down and cried." Almost everything said about Freireich by his friends contains a "but." I love him, but we nearly came to blows. I invited him to my house, but he insulted my wife. "Freireich remains to this day one of my closest friends," said Evan Hersh, an oncologist who worked with Freireich at the beginning of his career. "We take him to our weddings and bar mitzvahs. I love him like he is a father. But he was a tiger in those days. We had several terrible run-ins. There were times I wouldn"t speak to him for weeks."