I had thought I might be overwhelmed by Malcolm Gladwell’s spectacular hair — a mound of fusilli curls that has drawn comparisons with a keyring troll — but today it has been clipped back and as he sits not entirely comfortably on a couch in a London hotel, palms resting tentatively on his thighs, I am struck instead by his small, tense, runner’s body.

At 45, the author of The Tipping Point is a featherlight presence in jeans and science-nerd trainers: small and wiry, but really no bigger, I’d imagine, than he was at 15, when he gave up competitive middle-distance running as a schoolboy in Canada.

“I am actually a very nervous person,” he says quietly. “I used to get so nervous before races. I got nervous a month in advance. Nothing else comes close.” He’s perfectly happy nowadays getting up for a speech: “I just ask myself: is this worse than running a mile at top speed? The answer is, of course not.”

I think anyone would run a mile at top speed if they were paid what Gladwell is rumoured to get for a personal appearance: $80,000 (£48,500). He will not confirm this — “I never comment on anything to do with money: nothing good comes of it” — but he has come a long way from sobbing his eyes out before the 1500m.

A former Washington Post staffer, Gladwell has, since 2000, published three books that have taken him from relatively anonymous hack to literary superstar.

His first book, The Tipping Point, explained how massively successful trends sprang out of cultish followings and brought a new type of writing to the masses. Interweaving popular psychology with statistical analyses in mellifluous prose as comforting as a morphine drip, the book sold more than 2m copies in the United States alone and spawned a raft of popular non-fiction such as Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner.

Five years later Blink, an examination of how we make snap decisions, repeated the success and catapulted the author into Time magazine’s list of 100 top influential people. Last year, for a rumoured $4m advance, he produced Outliers, about, appropriately, what makes certain people freakishly successful.

Gladwell does not explicitly link the theme of Outliers to his own journey, although the final chapter is about his grandmother, a ballsy Jamaican who went out of her way to ensure a better education for her daughters, instilling a work ethic in Gladwell’s mother, a psychotherapist and writer, that has in turn benefited Gladwell.

“Both my parents are the embodiment of the idea of meaningful work,” he says. His mother met his white father, a maths professor, when she moved to London, but set up home in Canada, where Gladwell grew up, the youngest of three boys. “It’s an enormous gift to be able to observe your father doing his mathematics every day,” says Gladwell, who when he isn’t writing books contributes to The New Yorker magazine. He believes you should “push yourself. I try to keep working hard”.

In fact, if you want to be really successful at something, as he states in Outliers, you need to put 10,000 hours into it, or “roughly a decade”, although given that this equivalence is based on the slightly odd notion that a successful person puts in only four hours a day I suppose he might just as well say “roughly seven years” or “roughly five”, depending.

He is full of catchy broad-brush propositions that don’t quite hold up under questioning. The 10,000 hour claim, for example — the fruit of work by researchers who aren’t as famous as Gladwell — is substantiated by, among a few others, Gladwell’s own example of the Beatles, who during their time in Hamburg, he calculates, clocked up 1,200 marathon performances, or roughly 10,000 hours.

“It’s as close to a law as one can come,” he says now. “One cannot be a world-class musician, surgeon, composer, chess grandmaster . . . without 10,000 hours.” What about Abba, I ask. Millions of album sales and all in a few years. “Derivative. The Beatles are pioneers.”

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