Malcolm Gladwell

"...It´s about teaching yourself that everything is interesting."

Malcolm Gladwell, influential author and columnist, has a literary repertoire as eclectic as his roots. Born to a British mathematician father and Jamaican psychotherapist mother, he grew up in Canada and has a family tree that includes West Indian, Irish, and Igbo ancestors. He has developed into one of the most culturally stimulating and thought-provoking modern American writers. Gladwell´s professional journalism career began in 1987 with The Washington Post and in 1996 brought him to The New Yorker, where he has proven to be one of the publication's most followed columnists.

Gladwell´s natural curiosity and ability to find the reflexive in the everyday allows him to connect seemingly unrelated events and put them into a cause and effect relationship. The irony is that he never wanted to be a writer, and only when he had been rejected by eighteen advertising jobs and a fellowship abroad did he land in the profession by default. Gladwell´s column is a multi-disciplinary response to, and contemplation of, current events. In these ponderings of our culture and interactions, he has developed lexicons that could arguably define our generation such as "Tipping Point" (infectious behavior) and "outliers" (remarkable success stories). Gladwell is engaging in a way that merits reflection because he tells the stories we have heard before, but from a perspective that intersects and connects multiple ideas. Some of his published books include The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), and What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009).


Outliers: why success can be so personal

• Why people are successful: a different outlook
• Great performance is not an accident: beyond individual traits and into discipline and practice
• The secrets of success can be decoded–and copied and reconstructed
• The key success factors: talent; focused hard work; culture, coaching; and support
• Nurturing success: how to give others the best opportunities to succeed
• Matching individual skills and abilities with the ability


What are Outliers?

An outlier is someone whose success is so extraordinary that it inhabits a space outside the boundaries of everyday existence. Gladwell contends that our understanding of success is crude–and therefore digs down to come up with a better set of explanations. Instead of looking at individual characteristics or personality traits, Gladwell focuses on the Outlier's culture, community, family and generation. Instead of looking at tall trees, he thinks we should have been looking at the forest.