Looking at Malcolm Gladwell’s press clips you get a case study of an entire profession’s schadenfreude: in article after article (especially in the UK, where intellectuals are actually paid attention to, as opposed to the US, where they scarcely exist except to deliver big-bucks speeches to marketing teams if their ideas are profitable) you see the same anguished, damn-with-faint-praise focus — by reporters, who are basically in the same game as Gladwell — on the Gladwell success-juggernaut: his every book is on bestseller lists for ever! Sometimes two books at once! His speeches command $80,000 a gig! He is published all over the world!
And then — an echo of every philistine who has looked at a Jackson Pollock and said that his three-year-old could do as well — the bitchy observation that his theories are so darned obvious. Then, of course, the implicit conclusion, the cranky implication: “What has he got that I haven’t got?”
Indeed, Gladwell’s three lucrative theses are deceptively simple — even superficially simplistic. His first book, The Tipping Point, noted that at a point of critical mass . . . things change, and that certain people have outsize influence in making that happen. The second book, Blink, points out that first impressions and gut feelings matter. And now his third, Outliers, makes the case that to be successful you need to work hard and have some lucky breaks. To which one could certainly say, “Duh”.
But one would be wrong.
Just as Gladwell has served us well, especially in his most recent book, in holding success up to the light and deconstructing it, we would do well to take apart what makes a Gladwell book so important and culturally resonant. As a nonfiction writer I too confess to a certain crankiness at the inevitability of each of his book’s success. But sooner or later, every time, I read the thing, because no one else can do what he does.
Gladwell makes us look at very old, seemingly obvious issues in a very new way. Are these issues important? Only the most important of our day. In The Tipping Point, he gave nothing less than a new theory of how not only marketing but cultural history operate — and it was revolutionary in its implications.
By proving methodically that ideas spread from the ground up and are transmitted by peers one trusts — rather than being dictated top-down by pundits and ad men to be passively received — he switched the locus of power to the absorber or consumer of ideas and products (and inaugurated a vast trend for marketers to “seed” a product with “influencers” in a way that would hopefully “go viral”. He also anticipated the community-building and opinion-making power of the internet.) Adieu, unquestioned authority of newspapers, historians and Madison Avenue.
In Blink, to my mind his least successful book, he nonetheless proved that there is no such thing as a human being without bias. So long, myths of a post-racial, post-feminist, post-class-structure society. And in his most important book, the new Outliers — which could actually be called “Inliers” because it is about how perfectly ordinary people or garden-variety geniuses either do or do not get the breaks that will catapult them to the heights — he gives a sweeping, scorched-earth annihilation of the Western world’s delusion that there is such a thing as a functioning meritocracy; and he punctures for good America’s favourite fairytale, that anyone with grit and pluck can haul him or herself up by the bootstraps and succeed.
Big, even radical, accomplishments, intellectually; coming from a very mildmannered, very low-key — perhaps deliberately low-key — guy. How did Gladwell manage to build these highly controversial arguments so effectively — and, more surprisingly, ease them so seamlessly into the very heart of the mainstream?
I went to meet him on a sunny spring afternoon; he directed me to one of the prettiest (and most expensive) blocks of brownstones in the West Village of New York City. “Come to my office — it’s quiet there.” Quiet wasn’t the half of it: up four flights to a top-level eyrie — a full onebedroom apartment, newly painted, with a view to trees and rooftops. His office? Manhattan real-estate gold. On the floor were three gorgeous kilims. White walls; a leather couch; piles of galleys on a round library table. It was what a nonfiction writer’s office would look like in heaven.
Gladwell, now 45, was as I remembered him from our years of crossing paths in green rooms and book parties: youthful-looking; very slim; dressed casually, in jeans; a calm, attentive gaze; bright brown eyes; pale skin. The only unconventional note was that shock of hair, which I had always — for the many years when I had assumed, with my own biases, that Gladwell was Jewish — believed to have been what my tribe calls a “Jewfro”. (I learnt only a couple of years ago that Gladwell’s mother is Jamaican).
At first he was polite yet guarded. When it became clear that I was more interested in his method than in a “gotcha” moment, he relaxed and grew animated. Why did he choose to write sophisticated analysis for a popular audience?
“My father is an academic.” His father, Graham Gladwell, is originally from Kent and taught mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “I am comfortable in that world, but aware of how difficult that world is. For a long period I wanted to be an academic myself until I realised that was not where my strengths lay. My driving ambition is to let everyone else in on all the cool stuff that’s going on. The tragedy of academia,” he continued, “is how much fascinating stuff never gets outside the walls of academia, and I find that really heartbreaking.”
He grew up watching his father simply take pleasure in ideas. “So I associate ideas, and playing with ideas, with pleasure. It’s not work. It shouldn’t be drudgery or tedious or difficult to engage with these kinds of issues.” Gladwell was born in England. His parents (his mother was then Joyce Nation) met at the Christian Union of University College in London in the mid-1950s. After graduating, they overcame parental objections (Gladwell’s paternal grandparent cited New Testament verses signifying that God had set boundaries for the habitation of nations. His mother’s mother argued that it was wrong for Graham Gladwell to have a black child and wrong for Joyce to have a white child) to marry. They moved to Ontario in Canada where Gladwell was brought up, “a little farming town in the middle of nowhere. We were in the middle of Mennonite farming country: cornfields and cow pastures and people driving buggies. Most of the people I went to school with went home to work on a farm.”
One insight of Outliers with which I heartily agree is that half of success is learning, as wealthy kids do, a sense of entitlement. Looking at his own success did Gladwell feel, as he grew up, that he, too, was entitled? His friends have recalled how he was competitive (he was a champion middle distance runner as a teenager) from a young age. Oddly, he sidesteps the point, attributing all his breaks to luck: “I had two best friends growing up in this tiny town — one is an editor at The New York Times now; one is poli sci professor at Harvard. It was a wholly anomalous peer group. That was pure 100 per cent luck. Another random thing from my own history is I learnt the trade in the newspaper business at The Washington Post. Mike Isikoff was next to me and Bob Woodward was 15ft away.” Personally, I don’t buy the dumb-luck line; what paper wouldn’t employ Gladwell?
Surprisingly Gladwell worked early on for Insight, a right-wing publication. Though he never identifies his politics, one would not have assumed he started out as a right-wing ideologue; if anything his arguments are handy for a liberal’s advocacy, but he only laughed at my surprise. “Right out of the University of Toronto I came down to DC and worked for the Ethics and Public Policy Centre. I used to be a rightwinger back in the day.” Gladwell was at the Post for a decade, then freelanced for The New Yorker. “I did it on the sly. You could keep that under wraps in the days when talk pieces were unsigned.” He wrote an article called “Tipping Point” and the rest is history. “An agent urged me to turn it into a book. I think its success took everybody by surprise.”
His critics accuse him of telling stories at the expense of raw analysis. “As much as people love stories they are suspicious of them,” he says. “It’s no coincidence that we have that expression ‘so and so told a story’ — as if wool has been pulled over their eyes. In the past couple of years I have fallen really in love with narratives, picking the right narrative, telling a story through a single set of eyes. Some of the most powerful insights — psychological, sociological and moral — are in novels. It’s like saying, after they have read a great novel — where are the statistics to support the contention that Anna Karenina had a broken heart?”
“One of the ideas I really wanted to get across in Outliers — in the chapter on Jewish immigrants — is that a generation that by any contemporary standards grew up in the most impoverished of circumstances made it out spectacularly. That is a hugely important question — if we understand that secret we can use it to help others.”
So the question is how do you get at that secret?
“I can give you numbers and statistics until I am blue in the face — the only thing that answers the question is to sit across from someone like Joe Flom [a hugely successful lawyer from a modest background] and have them tell their stories. It is imperfect and necessarily imprecise. There is no alternative.”
It’s an important question, one that his own background must shed light upon.
“I had that sense, too, that the world was my oyster — I got it from my parents and from my friend Terry, the son of a chicken farmer, now a professor at Harvard. I had never met anyone before I met Terry who felt that the world was a kind of system that could be exploited in the best possible way.”
Today, some of the most exciting work is being done by people — Barack Obama, Doris Lessing, Gore Vidal, Larry Kramer — whose biographies for whatever reason allowed them to transcend categories or forced them to be “outsiders”. Does he think his own helped him to see things differently than others may have?
“You’re talking about the position of an outsider. I am an outsider many times over. An English person who grew up in Canada, neither white nor black — a multiple outsider.” This is an extraordinary way to refer to one’s heritage: usually people would say “I am biracial”, not “neither white nor black”. In a PC world, that insistence on a kind of transcendence of category takes guts. Gladwell wrote in a 1996 book on growing up biracial: “I am not like my parents. I do not have my father’s gift for overcoming social barriers, nor my mother’s gift for appreciating when differences are not relevant. I go back and forth now between my two sides. I never feel my whiteness more than when I’m around West Indians, and never feel my West Indianness more than when I’m with whites. If you mix black and white, you don’t obliterate those categories; you merely create a third category, a category that demands, for its very existence, an even greater commitment to nuances of racial taxonomy. By virtue of my upbringing, I can safely say I am free of racial discrimination. I cannot — without committing an act of extraordinary self-hatred — ever believe that blacks are in any way inferior. But I am also, perhaps permanently, hostage to the questions of racial difference.”
Today, he has evidently found a third way that has led to personal success, and insight for the rest of us. “I am so deracinated at this point, I can scarcely be constrained by taboos because I don’t know what the taboos are. It is a situational advantage that has been hugely important in my career.”
And at the end of his latest book he writes a celebration of his mother and grandmother, and how through pluck, hard work, a multitude of lucky accidents and help from the outside, this daughter of teachers left Jamaica, and in 1972 published a biography, Brown Face, Big Master (a success when first published, Gladwell had it reprinted in 2002 and says it is his favourite book), and ended up as a family psychologist in “a beautiful house on a hill”.
In each of Gladwell’s books there is really an agenda. In the most recent book, it is all about how individuals with incredible talents and gifts can easily fall through the cracks if they are not supported by a culture that values them. He seems to have made a mission of making sure that not one of these people gets overlooked or lost. Why is this mission so important to him?
“I was joking with my mom,” he recalls, “that my books are secular sermons. What is a sermon? It is a set of stories arranged around a text.”
Once again, he answers a very personal question with an abstraction. Why it is so important to him that these people not be lost? After a long silence he replies: “The line between my mother never making it out of Jamaica is so narrow that it is sobering. And absent a thousand different people and institutions working on her behalf, it does not happen. You can’t come from that and not be obsessed with it. This most recent book is my personal book. I feel strongly that the themes in the book are reflected in my own life. To examine my mother’s history in any kind of detail is to be struck by how many different influences and institutions contributed to her success.”
Do you have survivor guilt? For the first time, Gladwell laughs. “If it was a close call for your own flesh and blood,” he replies, “you care about this kind of stuff.”
Lucky for us he does; it helps us to care too, and, best of all, understand it better — even if we don’t have the outsider’s gift.
Malcolm Gladwell appears at Glasgow (June 22), Brighton (June 23) Liverpool (June 24) and Birmingham (June 25), www.malcolmgladwell- live.com. Times readers can buy tickets for the reduced price of £10.50 (quote promotional code “GLADWELL 1050” when booking). Outliers: The Story of Success is published by Penguin in paperback on June 25 at £9.99. To order it for £9.49 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst. Times Culture+ members can enter a competition to win a free copy of Outliers: visit timesplus.co.uk/culture; Naomi Wolf is author of The Beauty Myth
