HOWZAT

Okay, so what about all the rubbish bands who’ve practised for ever and are still rubbish?

“I’m not convinced there are plenty who have worked that hard,” he says. “In fact it’s quite rare. If you can find me a band that’s played together 1,200 times by their early twenties . . .” Well, I can’t, not in the hotel lobby — so what about 12-year-old chess geniuses? By definition they can’t have put in a decade. Again, what feels like another dodge: “They’re not competing for the world championship. I’m talking about mastery.”

This 10,000 hour thing may be a universal law but it doesn’t seem to apply to very many people. What about the rest of us? Him?

“How long did it take me before I was comfortable writing?” he asks rhetorically. “Actually about 10 years. I asked people how long it takes them to feel comfortable in what they do, if what they do is quite hard. You’d be surprised how often that number comes up.

“It’s not a precise fact, but it’s a very interesting general truth which has something to do with human structures of learning that do require some threshold amount of effort. Is it always going to be 10,000 hours? No. It’s going to be some variation when we get down into the . . .” So what is it exactly? “Probably higher than we intuitively think and in a surprising number of places approaches a decade . . .”

To be fair, Gladwell doesn’t pretend that his work is much more than “storytelling”. He’s not trying to prove anything, even though his many millions of readers might swallow it whole. He’s simply taking dry academic theories, adding fairy dust and turning them out as bestsellers. Or as he puts it: “I organise them and interpret them sometimes and sometimes I have my own thoughts, it’s just a kind of . . . I’m proud of the storytelling aspect of it.”

Is there anything original there? “I’m not . . . It would be demeaning to the academics to suggest I can come up with theories just like they did. It’s very difficult to come up with the idea and do the research. I’m very much the beneficiary of their insights. My contribution is writerly.”

He fully admits it’s a “trade-off”, that he is accused of sacrificing “exhaustiveness for accessibility. People towards the exhaustive end [ie the academics] are naturally going to have objections”. Well yes, especially when they see him enjoying a far more upscale life at home in New York, in an expensive brownstone in the West Village, than they could ever dream of. Perhaps that is why they can be snipey.

“Oh. Well,” he says. I don’t think he’s fussed about selling out, because as a journalist he wasn’t selling out in the first place. I think he likes making money — his first career was in finance, which he failed at. “I don’t think people have been that snipey. People have said nice things. Occasionally people are snipey, but when you’re snipey, you’re being snipey, and so people discount what you say. Snipiness is a self-defeating strategy. The cost of being snipey is greater than the damage in any context . . .”

Listening to Gladwell is like reading him. Calm, clinical and curiously intoxicating, he applies many of his theories to his everyday existence. Asked how he feels when someone attacks him, he refers to Blink and an analysis of marriage, which stipulates that marriage is happy “so long as the ratio of positive effect to negative effect is three to one. All I care about is my ratio of positive to negative. And it is”.

See, he has an answer to almost everything. When he doesn’t, he turns the question around. When I ask him what he does to relax, he says: “I’m sure if you told me what you do to relax, my relaxation would be exactly the same . . .”

He says he’s happy and dating someone, although he gets a bit shy about that. He wouldn’t change anything about his lot, although “I suppose I’d like to be taller”, he smiles. Tomorrow he’s giving a speech on the credit crunch: how the experts have messed it all up due to “overconfidence”, he says, confidently.

As for the future, he claims he’s not ambitious; his success “was never an intention”. Whatever: I am sure he’s put the hours in.

Outliers: The Story of Success is published by Penguin on Wednesday, priced £9.99

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