Showing posts with label Malcolm Gladwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Malcolm Gladwell. Show all posts

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Malcolm Gladwell / This much I Know / ‘No one thinks of me as a potential terrorist any more’

'I'm comfortable with silence.'
Malcolm Gladwell
Photograph by Mike McGrego

Malcolm Gladwell: ‘No one thinks of me as a potential terrorist any more’

The writer, 50, on board games, being pulled over at immigration and why he prefers a selfie


Tim Lewis
Saturday 26 July 2014 14.00 BST

I have a happy name. Glad. Well. It couldn’t be more cheery and uplifting. This is not a trivial thing; it’s possibly my parents’ greatest contribution to my wellbeing. And Malcolm seems substantial: it’s not a fly-by-night, suspicious name. It’s sturdy, forthright.
If I’m recognised, I much prefer the selfie. Otherwise you have to recruit a third party, who then has to line it up and can’t work the phone. The whole thing lasts forever. Selfies is “Boom!” You’re done.
The famous basketball coach John Wooden used to always say: “Be quick but don’t hurry.” Which is perfect writing advice.
I’m comfortable with silence. My happiest memories as a child were going for walks with my father and saying nothing. I almost never felt closer to him.
When my hair was long I was pulled over at immigration all the time. This was after 9/11, when America was in a heightened state of paranoia, and they assumed that straggly hair and a desire to bomb the United States went hand in hand. Now I’m too old to be pulled aside: I’ve moved into the innocuousness of middle age, so no one thinks of me as a potential terrorist any more.
Gladwells don’t have tempers. I can’t remember a time any of us raised our voice. We’re not a high-strung people.
I learned more about the world from playing board games than anything else. One summer I played 105 games of Monopoly in two months. We played Risk games that would take 15 hours. What you realise is that it’s nothing to do with what happens on the board. It’s everything to do with your relationships with the people you’re playing. That’s a really hard lesson to learn as a child.
Luck is not satisfying narratively. You can make a very plausible case that a huge amount of investing prowess is simple luck. But it’s much more satisfying to say Warren Buffett is possessed of special genius than to consider the possibility that he’s merely the luckiest investor of the last 100 years.

You have to take your hat off to Lance Armstrong. Even if you think he’s a jerk, he did it better than anybody else.
I don’t know why people think attention spans are getting shorter.Thirty years ago, you could go and get a sandwich in the middle of a Kojakepisode, come back and still follow it. Today, if you get a glass of water in the middle of Homeland you have to pause and go back.
Running teaches you about the inherent unfairness of the world. Two people can work exactly the same, in fact, one can be infinitely more devoted and train much harder and not do as well. An object lesson in how unfair life is.
The biggest mistake we make is trying to square the way we feel about something today with the way we felt about it yesterday. You shouldn’t even bother doing it. You should just figure out the way you feel today and if it happens to comply with what you thought before, fine. If it contradicts it, whatever. Life goes on.
David and Goliath (Penguin, £8.99) by Malcolm Gladwell is out now. 



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Sunday, May 2, 2010

Malcolm Gladwell / This much I know / I've nearly died several times

 Malcolm Gladwell outside his home in New York. Photograph: Annie Collinge

This much I know: Malcolm Gladwell


I've nearly died several times

The writer, 46, on espionage, the financial meltdown, and crying over Dickens


Tim Adams
Sunday 2 May 2010 00.35 BST

We need more generalists. Generalists outperform specialists in many tasks.
I'm only snobbish about running. Competitive runners disdain listening to music when they run; I want to at least give the impression I am listening only to my body.
I can't spend too long on the internet. I run out of things to look up really quickly.
I've nearly died several times. I hit a car flat out on a bicycle and flew 25ft through the air and was unscathed. I had to be dragged from frozen rapids by my dad as a child. I'm not at nine lives, but I'm close.
I see storytelling like a puzzle: you arrange details for people until you get them in just the right order.

The urge to predict, and the payoffs for pretending to be able to do so, are large. But no one ever knows for sure what will happen next.
We all used to listen to a preacher every Sunday; the human need for that kind of storytelling does not go away. It's up to writers and journalists to fill the gap.
History suggests that there is almost exactly a 50% chance that any piece of information a spy gives you is true. We would be as well off getting rid of the secret service and flipping coins.
At the root of the financial meltdown was a profound kind of laziness. These people just weren't doing their jobs – 95% of them called it wrong.
I prefer great songwriters to politicians. I am drawn to minor genius.
My father, the most proper of Englishmen, from Sevenoaks, would cry reading Dickens to us as kids. Those are the passages I remember.
I have idea block. I go through weeks where I think there is nothing new.
Hollywood is strangely indifferent to questions of faith, while the rest of America is consumed by them.
Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.




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