Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, CMis an English-born Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Outliers: The Story of Success, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, a collection of his journalism, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. All five books were...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 September 1963
CountryCanada
People assume when my hair is long that I am a lot cooler than I actually am. I am not opposed to this misconception, by the way, but it is a misconception.
Age-class running, as you know, is completely unreliable. It's based on this artificial thing, which is that people who are the same age have the same level of physical maturity. Which just isn't true.
The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.
That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.
Do you remember the wrestler Andre the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly.
You walk into the class in second grade. You can't read. What are you going to do if you're going to make it? You identify the smart kid. You make friends with him. You sit next to him. You grow a team around you. You delegate your work to others. You learn how to talk your way out of a tight spot.
I don't golf. I've never golfed. I will never golf.
I am far more distress-avoidant than I am joy-seeking.
Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community.
I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.
The most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly.
It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.
It's the boiling point. It's the moment when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.