Hi everyone, Happy Monday!
Malcolm Gladwell has been called “the best storyteller on the planet”. He has explored how ideas spread, decision making, the roots of success, the advantages of disadvantages.
Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell) has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. and has authored several books including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and Talking To Strangers
Gladwell’s strength lies in his ability to take disparate ideas across disciplines — sociology, psychology, medicine, and economics — and link them in a way that enables the reader to see reality from a different perspective.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s books, millions of readers grasp complex ideas like behavioral economics and performance prediction.
Credit: Ted.com
1 STORY FROM HIM
David & Goliath
When it came to athletics, Gladwell was a Goliath. He started taking running seriously aged 13 and soon after he won the county cross-country championships. He pushed himself so hard that day he almost lost consciousness when he crossed the finish line. Still, he had learned the most important lesson of athletics: physical barriers don’t exist, only psychological ones. (After ducking out of our run in Hyde Park, this is evidently something I have still to grasp.) The following year, at the 1978 Ontario championships, he was the 1,500 meters champion for Midget Boys — a category, one suspects, that has since been renamed — clocking a seriously impressive four minutes five seconds. The boy he’s beating, Dave Reid, would go on to become a legend of Canadian middle-distance running.
But little more than a year later, Gladwell “retired” from competitive running. Why? Injuries played a part, but mostly it was the fact that he was no longer the best. In 1979, aged 15, he returned to the Ontario championships and actually ran a faster time (4:03.3) but only finished in fourth place. “I never thought I was going to go to the Olympics or anything grand,” says Gladwell now. “So that’s why I stopped racing. There was no future in it.”
Gladwell may not have competed seriously anymore, but he never forgot the lessons of his nascent athletics career. After pushing himself to exhaustion to win those first two races, he had started to question why someone with his advantages — “a healthy and normal teenager from a well-adjusted family” — should have to endure such discomfort in order to prevail.
This dilemma is presented in a more extreme form in David & Goliath: giants get toppled either because they become complacent or they learn what it takes to sustain their excellence and that knowledge becomes paralyzing. “My fear of the experience grew too overwhelming,” is how Gladwell explains his own athletic downfall. In other words, the hard part of success is often not getting to the top but staying there.
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.”
“That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being — to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Be interesting, not perfect
Gladwell says that people are often drawn to things that are done imperfectly. Whether it’s art, movies, or books, people talk more about the flawed things that get stuck in their heads than they do the obvious, perfect things. “You want an aftertaste, and that comes from not everything being perfectly blended together,” he says. “The question is: What is interesting? That’s what has to drive any creative act.”
How to have an interesting conversation
The central problem most people have is that they don’t know why they’re interesting. Ask questions that draw out the strongest, most unique qualities in a person. Gladwell recommends being naive, humble, and using the word “wait” to slow down the conversation and allow the other party to flesh out their ideas. “Humility means saying, ‘I am more interested in you than I am in me for this conversation,’” he says. If you listen intently, you’re bound to have an interesting encounter.
Fall into intellectual rabbit holes
If you want to unearth new ideas, get off the internet. On the internet, you’re part of social media platforms that often confirm your existing beliefs. If you type a question into Google, you’re served the most popular queries. So how do you uncover fresh new ideas? Gladwell says you need to create an environment that facilitates falling into intellectual rabbit holes. He offers three tips. First, take a walk through towns or buildings that pique your curiosity. Next, go to the library, identify books you’ve liked reading in the past, and look around them on the shelf to discover something new. Finally, look at the footnotes in books or articles because they often lead you to other sources that can help you learn the subject more intimately.
Though I believe you can also fall into intellectual rabbit holes over the internet easily using reddit or twitter
Reading/Watching/Listening Links -
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/malcolm-gladwell-talking-to-strangers/id1264843400?i=1000450179062
https://www.newstatesman.com/2020/01/how-sell-good-ideas
Most gifted book - Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy Wilson
That’s it from me, until next Monday! Be safe and stay indoors :)
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