Magic number
If Malcolm Gladwell's CV didn't exist, someone surely would have to invent it. Born in Fareham, England, but raised in Canada, he spent a decade at The Washington Post before moving to The New Yorker, where he has become one of the most prominent cultural commentators working today. His first two books, The Tipping Point and Blink, sold millions of copies and paved the way for non-fiction best-sellers including Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's Freakonomics and Nicholas Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan.
In 2005, Time magazine named Gladwell among its '100 most influential people' . He reputedly received a US$1 million advance for Blink, which has also been adapted for the cinema by Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of Traffic.
Now 45, Gladwell has been called a stud, a phenomenon and the cleverest man alive. If that isn't enough, he has really cool hair (imagine a mildly startled porcupine) and a deadpan sense of humour. Applying for a job at The American Spectator, Gladwell answered the question, 'Why do you want to work at The American Spectator?' by writing: 'Doesn't everyone want to work at The American Spectator?'
The line worked.
Given all his high-powered achievement, it's possibly a cliche waiting to happen that Gladwell's latest book is called Outliers: The Story of Success. Has the man once described as 'the most influential thinker of the iPod generation' fallen into the trap beloved of rock stars everywhere and written about the trials of wealth, groupies and what the nasty old papers say?
I should have known better. Or as Gladwell might put it: 'Part of what lies behind Outliers is the idea that our immediate responses are not always right and sometimes badly wrong. We read things in a particular way and unless we ... go back over them, we can fundamentally mislead ourselves.'
After all, Gladwell has made a career out of interrogating the obvious and refreshing the parts of everyday life other writers can't reach. 'I always think of my writing as an attempt to organise ordinary experience,' he says from his New York home. 'They are exercises in curiosity, right? There is a series of dots - can we possibly connect them in a way that is interesting? Can we start an interesting conversation about a given topic? That's really what my books are about.'
In Outliers, this conversation occasionally sounds like the first half of a whimsical joke. Why do so many aspiring Canadian hockey players have birthdays in January, February or March? Why were so many software giants (including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt) born in 1955? How did Robert Oppenheimer poison his Cambridge supervisor and escape punishment? And why, during the 1990s, were pilots at Korean Airlines 17 times more likely to crash than those at American Airlines? Each question, however, represents a serious attempt to investigate a particular 'outlier' - Gladwellian shorthand for that breed apart, the extremely successful. Although he calls accomplishment 'incredibly attractive', the reason he begins with a collection of superstars including the Beatles is to reveal our common humanity.
'If you are interested in explaining and understanding success, it's always most fruitful to start at the extremes and work back towards the middle,' he says. 'If you want to understand hard work, you should write about the most hard-working people. If you want to understand great pilots, you should start with the worst.'
So Gladwell also investigates the flip-side of success (the child genius who drops out of college) and the lives of mere mortals: feuding families in the American south, disadvantaged students at a school in the Bronx, even his own Jamaican mother and grandmother.
Outliers doesn't laud the mega-successful so much as bring them down to Earth. 'I felt there has been a self-congratulatory strain in the culture where successful people justified their position on the top of the pyramid on the basis of their own great personal virtues,' he says. 'The principal proponent of the rags to riches myth was Andrew Carnegie, the second wealthiest man in human history. He went out of his way to say that only the poor had the wherewithal to become rich. Talk about a strategy for justifying his own achievement and fighting off the income tax.'
Gladwell admits talent and hard work play crucial roles in making it to the top: Outliers recommends no fewer than 10,000 hours of practice for any budding tycoon, rock star or writer. But he places equal emphasis on random events outside our control: luck, opportunity, timing, community and the significance of cultural inheritance.
He argues that the Jewish background of lawyers such as Joe Flom enabled them to view the New York legal world of the 1950s from fresh angles. 'They didn't inherit a whole series of assumptions about what legal work was and that was phenomenally useful,' he says.
In the case of the Korean air crashes, a culture of deference made co-pilots reluctant to correct the mistakes of their superiors.
When I ask Gladwell about his own cultural background, he says his 'baroque' personal history has been central in shaping the kind of writer he has become. It is a story that contains recurring themes: the pursuit of freedom, a desire for autonomy, a willingness to work hard and the drive to succeed. In other words, an Outlier's main criteria for meaningful work.
Born to a Jamaican mother and English father, Gladwell lived in England until he was six, when the family moved to Ontario. Describing himself as a 'double-immigrant', he says his place on the margins grants him valuable insights, especially into American life. 'There are considerable advantages to being an outsider. It's no accident that Canadians play a disproportionate role in American popular culture. We have a unique perspective and that can be enormously useful if you are in the culture business.'
Although he spent his childhood 'in a hurry', Gladwell learned the value of patience and work from his father's dedication as a mathematician. 'The problem as a child is you cannot conceive of 10,000 hours. That's 10 years of effort. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to success kids have is that they give up before they have put in the necessary time investment.'
A good if not brilliant student, Gladwell says he was more interested in 'fashioning' his own experience. 'I sort of did what I wanted. That didn't always correspond with what the teacher wanted.' After an initial interest in business (he pursued a career in advertising), Gladwell moved into journalism during the mid-1980s, flirting briefly with right-wing politics at The American Spectator. His big break came at The Washington Post, where he logged the 10,000 hours of practice that transformed his writing. 'The Post was a crucible of meaningful work. I arrived a poor writer and an even worse reporter. I emerged a good writer and an excellent reporter.'
Increasingly drawn to longer-form journalism, Gladwell moved to The New Yorker, which offered the autonomy he craved.
'I had the freedom to engage ideas in more detail and to express more of my own personality,' he says. This means developing his role as middleman between the general reader and academia (which he calls the Theory Industry).
'It's the cliche I keep repeating. I think people are experience-rich and theory-poor. I am in the business of trying to help with the theory-poor part. Intellectuals make sense of things. Intermediaries like me translate for a broader audience. We have a nice little intellectual food chain going on.'
This is the reason Gladwell gives when refusing to define himself as an Outlier. 'I am conscious of the fact that I am writing about other people's ideas and other people's accomplishments. So I don't think I fall into that exclusive category.'
Someone more likely to qualify is President Barack Obama. Gladwell finds one aspect of his background especially intriguing. 'In terms of my discussion about the subtleties of racial heritage [in Outliers], Obama is more than interesting. The first black man to become president is not of African-American heritage. Nor was Colin Powell. They are outsiders. That's a powerful testament to just how debilitating the American slave experience was.'
Gladwell balances this depressing interpretation with a more optimistic story. He cites the Bronx school that is transforming the lives of many disadvantaged African-American children through the simple expedient of time: longer lessons, extended working days and shorter holidays. Where there is understanding, Gladwell says, there is hope.
'The first half of the book is a little bleak. Success is random and not nearly as self-directed as we think. The second half is more uplifting. By the end, I want people to think we can have more control through the cultural choices we make and the kind of institutions we set up.'
If we do that, he says, we stand a better chance of becoming Outliers ourselves.
Writer's notes
Name: Malcolm Gladwell Genre: narrative non-fiction Latest book: Outliers - The Story of Success (Penguin, 2008) Age: 45 Born: Fareham, England Raised: Ontario, Canada Family: single Lives: New York Other works: The Tipping Point (Penguin, 2000), Blink (Penguin, 2006). Other jobs: staff writer for The New Yorker; reporter with The Washington Post and The American Spectator Next project: more journalism for The New Yorker
What the papers say: 'If you want to trust my snap judgment, buy this book: you'll be delighted. If you want to trust my more reflective second judgment, buy it: you'll be delighted but frustrated, and left wanting more.' - The New York Times on Blink
'The book features the fascinating case studies, skilled interweavings of psychological experiments and explanations and unexpected connections among disparate phenomena that are Gladwell's impressive trademark.' - The Washington Post on Blink
'Gladwell is a gifted storyteller, able to find memorable characters and delightful anecdotes wherever he goes. But for much of the book, he struggles to figure out what he really wants to say.' - The Wall Street Journal on Blink