The Costco Connection - October 2013

FRANCE FREEMAN

of immigrants, has been a real advantage and served him well in his journalistic endeavors.

The seeds of Gladwell’s career were sown
during his formative years. After his British
birth, the family moved around, including
spending time in Jamaica, but Gladwell
essentially grew up in Ontario, Canada. His
father was a professor of mathematics and
engineering at the University of Waterloo,
and his mother was a psychotherapist. “My
mother is a wonderful writer who has the gift
of saying complicated things very simply and
clearly,” says Gladwell. “I always wanted to
write like her.”
After graduating from the University of
Toronto’s Trinity College in the summer of
1984 with a degree in history, Gladwell
landed a gig writing for American Spectator
magazine for a few months. He then worked
for the now-defunct Insight magazine for a
year, did a few odd jobs, then landed at The
Washington Post in 1987, writing about sci-
ence and business and becoming their New
York bureau chief.

Once his tenure at that position ended, Gladwell did not want to return to Washington, D.C. He had already written four or five stories for The New Yorker, so they felt comfort-

Considering that author Malcolm Gladwell explores tales of long shots turned success stories in his inspiring new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, it might be tempting to compare him to a humble David who became a writing Goliath. But the fact is that the celebrated author and New Yorker staff writer achieved his current fame serendipitously. His career and worldview have been powered by the passion of his convictions, as well as his ability to absorb ideas and learn from his subjects. No toppling required.

Despite his incredible success as a literary giant—four international best-sellers, well-paid corporate and collegiate speaking engagements, honorary degrees and being named an influential person by Time magazine—Gladwell is a down-to-earth individual. When we meet for a lunchtime interview at Morandi, a picturesque Italian trattoria in New York’s West Village, the slender, curly-haired writer, who recently turned 50 but looks years younger, inquires if he is late, although we are both early. He is casually dressed in a T-shirt, shorts and running shoes. He likes to ride his bike around town and has become an avid runner again; he was a champion runner in high school in Canada and is a huge sports fan.

Inspired by the improbable

Gladwell is the opposite of disagreeable, the word he uses to describe many of the underdogs chronicled in his new book, people who overcame perceived disadvantages to change their lives and the world. The word is not meant to be a stigma but a way to identify those people who, through means, motivation and even hubris, managed to make their mark in unusual and unorthodox ways.

These disagreeable folks include Gary Cohn, the president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, who learned to use his verbal skills and chutzpah to compensate for his dyslexia; the Impressionist painters, who, after mostly being rejected by the prestigious Salon in Paris, started their own modest art gallery to gain notoriety; Wyatt Walker, Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand man, who knew how to strategize and how to manipulate the media to advance the cause of civil rights; and Emil Freireich, the blustery, imposing doctor who used unconventional and even controversial means to battle childhood leukemia.

“Doing something disagreeable is doing something that is frowned upon by your peers, that is offensive to your peers and that requires you as a person to take extraordinary social risks,” Gladwell tells The Connection.

“Sometimes that strays into things that are downright questionable. In Freireich’s case, he was breaking lots of rules, but his argument would’ve been the rules are dumb. In retrospect, he was right. He also had to be cold-blooded, like when I tell the story about him jabbing the needles into the kids to get the bone marrow. It’s really hard to do. Most people didn’t want to do it and were looking for reasons not to do it. He didn’t let those kinds of considerations get in the way of what he knew had to be done, and I think that’s an incredibly disagreeable act and an incredibly heroic act at the same time. I think he’s an extraordinary figure.”

Beginnings of brilliance

There is a bit of the disagreeable in Gladwell’s own family. The writer was born to an English father and Jamaican mother who met in college in England. “For a black person and a white person to marry in the late

1950s was a fairly radical act, so they’re not shrinking violets,” observes Gladwell.

“My father is quite indifferent to what the world thinks. He does what he thinks is right. So there’s a tradition of iconoclasm in my family.” He feels that seeing the world through the “unfamiliar eyes” of outsiders,