Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of self-correction (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us Tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

You've asked for more spirited conversations with Malcolm Gladwell, so we've answered. I hosted him for a live authors at Wharton Event. The occasion was his new book, revenge of the Tipping Point. It's a rethinking of his first big idea a quarter century later.

[00:00:35] Malcom Gladwell: I have never understood why people perceive changing your mind

[00:00:39] Adam Grant: as

[00:00:39] Malcom Gladwell: being costly,

[00:00:40] Adam Grant: and it sparked big questions for me about building healthy cultures, fixing college admissions, and handling mistakes and failures.

[00:00:48] Malcom Gladwell: The fastest way to make something go away is just to say I was wrong. Just it's the easiest strategy in the world. What's wrong?

[00:00:55] Adam Grant: We also riff on topics ranging from when to stop reading a book to how to stop basing self-esteem on success. You're in for a treat.

Malcolm Gladwell, we meet again. Hi Adam. I have some beef with you. Okay, let's go. A lot of it. Um, which is why I'm very glad that you're back again to do this. Yeah. You know, this is a very strange friendship we have. I actually think we've had more interaction arguing in front of an audience than we have in all other venues.

[00:01:23] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah. I, I have actually a theory about why you're this way, which I, I wait, you're, you're blaming me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all, it's all about you. I'm not gonna share it now 'cause it's inappropriate, but I'll tell you later about what my explanation is.

[00:01:35] Adam Grant: I did get some interesting feedback recently. Uhhuh.

My favorite one was, I just love listening to the two of you Fuss and pick at each other. Okay. I was like, I've never heard those words used endearingly before, but thank you. And then the, the theme was that people like it better when I interview you than when you interview me.

[00:01:54] Malcom Gladwell: Our interactions tend to be pretty symmetrical, so it's not really about, they like it better.

When I talk the most. What they're really saying is they like it better when you initiate the topics. Maybe I just bring up boring things and you bring up interesting things.

[00:02:07] Adam Grant: Well, that's very sweet of you to say. Yeah, and it does, it does track with one of my hypotheses, which was like, wait a minute. So are they saying, I am a better journalist than you are because they want me to be asking the questions and then I thought, no, it means you're a more interesting thinker than I am.

No, because the answers that you give stop. Stop. Uh, so I don't know what to do with any of that, so I'm just gonna leave it there. But we are, we are gonna disagree on a lot of things tonight and Okay. I don't think there's anyone I have more fun disagreeing with.

[00:02:41] Malcom Gladwell: Okay. It's a lot of buildup, Adam.

[00:02:43] Adam Grant: Well, let, let me, let me first just say you changed my mind about something with, with the new book.

Okay. I was a fervent disbeliever in nonfiction sequels. Oh. Hated the idea. Yeah. You're just gonna end up being the musician that is perpetually stuck singing your first great hit over and over again. Yeah. And you made me rethink that. Oh, but, uh, tell me, tell me why you were motivated to do

[00:03:09] Malcom Gladwell: this. It was the 25th anniversary of Tipping Point, and my publisher came to me and said, you should just clean it up, modernize it, reissue it.

And I got halfway into it and realized I didn't want to do that. And so I just ended up rewriting it.

[00:03:26] Adam Grant: As one does.

[00:03:27] Malcom Gladwell: Yes, as one does. 25 years is an extraordinary long period of time. There were things about. Covid, and particularly the opioid crisis that I really, really, really wanted to. Talk about. I couldn't see a way to fit those two things in a simple revise of the original book.

[00:03:42] Adam Grant: I felt like in some ways it was a harder book to write than the original, because the original, no one thought about epi epidemics really at all, except if you weren't an epidemiologist, you didn't know anything about epidemiology. And now we've been through a pandemic. Yeah. People are pretty familiar with this language, and so I felt like your degree of difficulty went up quite a bit to write this one.

[00:04:01] Malcom Gladwell: Well, the, the task of the first book was to convince people of the appropriateness of thinking about ideas as epidemics. Those viruses in this book, we've all accepted that. So now the task is to kind of convince people that there is more to be said. When I wrote the first one, I was covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post, and I was spending all this time with epidemiologists.

They're a very special breed, and you need to know this because whenever there is a epidemic, they. Surface and they're in the news. And so I remember once I was having lunch with some guy from CDC, he was a big epidemiologist and we're in a restaurant that has a salad bar, and one of the things in the salad bar is coleslaw with lots of mayonnaise and the salad bar was configured such that the sun was.

Streaming in the window and landing directly on the mayonnaise. Now, as any epidemiologist will happily tell you, that's a sure way to get food poisoning. Salmonella. Here we come. So throughout the entire lunch, I just see him going like this. He just can't take his eyes off the sun falling on the coleslaw.

Right? And the point is like those guys are laser focused on the possibility of something going badly wrong. They will, they will almost always err on the side of imagining things will be worse than they were. Which is exactly what you want in an epidemiologist, right? The, the epidemiologist who denies that anything bad is gonna happen is useless.

They're just like us. They're in denial, right? You want someone who's on the other side of denial.

[00:05:34] Adam Grant: Okay. So it sounds like by your theory, a good epidemiologist is a defensive pessimist, not a strategic optimist.

[00:05:41] Malcom Gladwell: Yes. I like that. I've, I wish I knew more about what this turns in, but Well, I was gonna tell you Yes, that's right.

But no, that sounds right and yeah, it sounds right.

[00:05:50] Adam Grant: So tell me where else this applies then. So, strategic optimists studying for a, a big test about a week beforehand, they will imagine themselves acing the test and then that positive image of the future is energizing. They study really hard, they do great defensive pessimists, have a very different emotional experience.

This is Julie Norm's research. Uh, what they do is about a week beforehand, they wake up in a cold sweat, having just had a nightmare that not only did they fail the exam, they did so bad that their professor took away points on all their previous exams. Because there's no way they could have earned it.

[00:06:21] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah.

[00:06:22] Adam Grant: And that anxiety motivates them to study really hard. And they do just as well as the strategic optimists, unless you put them in a good mood, if you wanna sabotage a defensive pessimist, you make them happy and then they get complacent. They don't study hard and they don't have the fear, uh, they kick kicks them into gear.

You are

[00:06:38] Malcom Gladwell: the pessimist. Sometimes I would've thought you were like all the way down the line. You are the one who, when we were backstage now, someone asked you the question of how did your early. Experience as a competitive diver shape you. And you said, well, when I was diving as a kid, my coach would grade me on a scale of one to 10 after every dive.

And I realized that's the way to live your life. And I was like, wait, what? That sounds That is nuts. That is, that is not even close to what I said. What did you say? Not even close. You said that's a good model for your career or something.

[00:07:09] Adam Grant: I said it's a helpful skill for your career. Yes. And you said there's too little grading?

Yes, far too little. If you only get evaluated once a quarter, that is a terrifying. Event full of judgment

[00:07:20] Malcom Gladwell: and shape. Yeah. But you're talking about being evaluated multiple times of over the course. How many dives would you do in a typical diving practice? 50. You get 50 evaluations.

[00:07:28] Adam Grant: Yeah. And none of them, like, no individual score hurts and you know exactly where you stand.

And then you can talk about how to move closer to your target score.

[00:07:35] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah,

[00:07:36] Adam Grant: I, I do this every time I do anything that matters to me. Like after we get off stage, I will ask anybody who's nearby and trustworthy, give us a zero outta 10. And then what can we do to get closer to 10? The people who work with me closely are gonna offer it without even me asking.

'cause they know I want it.

[00:07:51] Malcom Gladwell: Really? Yeah. What a way to live your life. Do you, do you, wait, Malcolm, hold on a second. Are you a cook?

[00:07:58] Adam Grant: No, definitely not.

[00:07:59] Malcom Gladwell: Well, that's why you're not a cook, because you can't be a cook and have somebody giving you a grade of one to 10 after every meal. That's debilitating. Not at all.

It's motivating because I'm a cook. I come home, I'm exhausted. My partner does not cook, so it's up to me to cook the meal. So I cook the meal. I actually enjoy doing it. The last thing I want is feedback on it. Once it's finished, I'm like, I'm sorry I'm, I did this. It took me an hour. That's your prize right there.

[00:08:28] Adam Grant: Then you have no aspirations of getting better as a cook, do you?

[00:08:31] Malcom Gladwell: No, because I, no, that's not true. I have gotten a lot better, 'cause privately I critique myself, but

[00:08:38] Adam Grant: I think Oh, and you trust that judge.

[00:08:41] Malcom Gladwell: I do trust that Judge you. So this is a difference between my family culture and your family culture.

[00:08:47] Adam Grant: Is it?

[00:08:48] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah, it is. So in my family culture, father is Englishman. Mother is Jamaican. You did not give feedback on stuff like that. You were polite to a fault. If there you had a problem with it, you kept it to yourself. This is a version of this thing that I really love the difference between sender and receiver cultures, right?

The Japanese are a receiver culture. It is up to the person listening to make sense of what the speaker is saying. America is a sender culture. If there's a misunderstanding, it's the fault of the person speaking right. I'm not sender, I'm I'm receiver. I say it, you figure it out. Right. And I'm talking about in the family context.

If I extend that to I make dinner, you say it's lovely. That's, those are the rules. I,

[00:09:37] Adam Grant: I expect the people who care about me, to be honest with me,

[00:09:40] Malcom Gladwell: I think you made us tougher stuff than I am.

[00:09:42] Adam Grant: I don't, I don't think that's true. I just, I, this is partially a defensive pessimism thing. I know that people are making those judgements privately.

And so I'd rather know what's in their head than have it be a secret. Oh, I see. Okay. Are you saying when you sent me the, the early draft of revenge, of the tipping point, and you asked for comments, you didn't want me to give a zero to 10? Along with the notes,

[00:10:03] Malcom Gladwell: I wanted you to be as critical as possible, but that's because I sent it to you early in the process, right?

Writers make, always make the mistake of sending something out too late. The, the mistake people make is they think it's embarrassing to show their work when it is, uh, unformed, but in fact, that's the only time to show your work. Because how else are you gonna form it? We do this thing with my podcast, which I really love, which is I do a first draft of revisionist history and then we do the table read and we bring in as many people as we can, and it's supposed to be early and they just let loose, you know?

I go, what do you think? Like, tell me like, you know, and, 'cause I think people think that they don't have standing. To weigh in on someone's writing if they're, they are not themselves experienced writer, but that is the exact opposite of the truth. You actually want someone who's not in your little world to be giving you feedback about that.

[00:10:59] Adam Grant: Disappointed to find, we agree on that.

[00:11:01] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah.

[00:11:02] Adam Grant: They will often give you solutions that are not. Right for your problem. And so I find that sometimes they jump too quickly to, here's the thing you need to do to fix this. I'm like, why are you giving that suggestion? Oh, that's the problem you're trying to solve.

I, I was too close to it to see the problem, but you're too far from it to see the right solution for me. Yeah. I actually find the process of like, tell me what the holes are, point out the flaws, and then I wanna fix them on my own. Yeah. To be much more helpful than solve it for me.

[00:11:29] Malcom Gladwell: No, I agree with that.

[00:11:30] Adam Grant: So this goes to what I think is the meta theme of the revenge of the tipping point, which is self-correction.

[00:11:36] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah.

[00:11:36] Adam Grant: We live in a world that does not do enough of it, where people are afraid of it, where people base their entire professional careers on avoiding it. Why are you so enthusiastic about admitting that you're wrong?

[00:11:48] Malcom Gladwell: My father sort of intellectually the most important. Figure in my life. He died a couple years ago and I wrote in his obit, he was an expert on three things, mathematics, the Bible, and gardening, and on everything else, he was open to correction. Even on those three things, actually, he was more than open, more than willing to be.

He sort of modeled a way of being in the world. That to me as a kid, was incredibly exciting. I just love the fact that you really never knew where he was gonna land on a. Question. I have never understood why people perceive changing your mind as being costly.

[00:12:27] Adam Grant: They're afraid of getting judged as stupid, or there's a risk of being seen as a hypocrite like you.

How, how dare you change your mind? You didn't, you're not who I thought you were.

[00:12:35] Malcom Gladwell: I came to Penn, do doing a podcast. Didn't go on what I, a podcast episode on what I got wrong about crime in the original tipping point.

[00:12:43] Adam Grant: This is the, the broken window and stop and frisk episode. Yeah.

[00:12:47] Malcom Gladwell: In, in my original book a Tipping Point, I had a chapter that it had opened with this very famous story from New York in the early 1980s.

It was a, a case involving a, a guy named Bernie Gaetz, and this is when New York is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. It's just a hellhole, and this is the absolute Nader of New York's fortunes. There's a very, very famous case where teenagers, young African American. Come up to a guy named Bernie Getz on the subway, and they ask him for money, and Bernie Getz pulls out a gun, shoots them, and one of the kids is down on the ground, shoots him and paralyzes him for life.

It's this huge story. He becomes this tabloid hero and this symbol of for New Yorkers of like, we've had enough, we can't take the crime anymore, blah, blah, blah. So I opened with this story of Bernie Getz and. My point, the point of the chapter is in order to understand why Bernie Gtz would do this, you have to understand the effect of the environment of New York in those years on the people who live there.

Right? I come to Penn and I'm meeting up with a woman named Eugenia South who's a ER doc in the hospital just across the way, and she had a bunch of folks who she was gonna have me meet with him. Then we're gonna go out around anyway at lunch. She said, I read your chapter. And there's something that just struck me about it, and that is that when you write that chapter about the Bernie Goetz case, you spend pages talking about Bernie Goetz and why he thought the way he thought, and you have two sentences on the three kids who confronted him.

And I was like, really? I went back and I was like, oh my God, I did. She said what was fascinating to her and problematic about the chapter was that here I had an encounter between two sets of people and I thought that. The white guy who was quote unquote the victim, although he was the, actually the assailant was the interesting one, and the black kids, two sentences, I just kind of wrote them off and didn't return to them again.

And she was like, that's why you got it wrong. Right? That's what she was saying. You got it wrong because you bought into a narrative that said that the white people of New York were the victims of what was happening in those years and the. Black kids were just stand-ins for criminals. I was like, Jesus.

My first thought was, whoa. That is about as devastating a criticism as anyone has ever made of something, particularly since I am half Jamaican. I wouldn't have thought I would've fallen into that trap, but I did right now. It never occurred to me though that that criticism was, she wasn't saying that I was stupid.

Right. She was saying that you were. Blinded by something when you wrote that book, and she was also saying it to me 25 years later, and the test of whether I was open or intelligent or whatever, was in how I responded to her, not in what I wrote 25 years ago. Right. I never thought I was being personally threatened by that.

I've thought about it a million times. I mean, it's, I want to find every copy of the tipping point out there and just rip out that chapter. I mean, it's mortifying, but it doesn't diminish. Me as a person, that's it, that when I was three, six years old, I like fundamentally misunderstood. So that's just the way I thought about it.

She's, she's offering me an an opportunity to redeem myself by pointing out what I did wrong.

[00:16:08] Adam Grant: There's a difference between saying, okay, I wanna learn from this and not make this kind of mistake again, and even correct the past and saying, you know what? You know what would be more fun than that? Let me just broadcast some of my biggest failures and dumbest mistakes to the world.

[00:16:23] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah.

[00:16:23] Adam Grant: You, you go to unusual lengths to make your embarrassments public. Well,

[00:16:28] Malcom Gladwell: you did it with the

[00:16:28] Adam Grant: Monk

[00:16:29] Malcom Gladwell: debate. Oh my God. Yeah. That was, there's a thing in Toronto called the Monk Debate. It's a big deal in Canada, and they bring in people and they broadcast it all over and you have, you debate some question and I came in about a year and a half ago and not only did my side lose by an absolutely devastating margin, but I was.

So terrible that afterwards, the amount of vitriol that was directed my way online was unprecedented. And so I did a podcast episode, my podcast basically saying I was terrible. And then I went to debate school in Brooklyn in some high school, and they taught me how to be a better debater. It, it's out there that you were embarrassing and terrible.

The best thing to do is just embrace it and say, own it, and then just say. Wow, I was bad, and here's how I'm trying to get better. Right. You can't run away from it.

[00:17:17] Adam Grant: I, I agree. In principle, I think in practice, I still thought it was extremely courageous of you to do that because you, you also made that failure visible to a lot of people who didn't know how bad you were.

[00:17:27] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah. There's that, but it's fine. The, the audience, these things is not that large. There's 330 million people in this country. How many Listen to a podcast. It's like this many. It's fine. The other thing that people forget when they screw up and then they apologize for it, is you are the only one who remembers it.

Everyone else just moves on with their life. This is a good question for a psychologist, and that is what is the effect of an apology on the listener's memory of the event. And I think that when someone does something wrong and apologizes, what that does is implicitly give the listener the, uh, permission to file that away.

To get to remove it from everyday consideration.

[00:18:08] Adam Grant: I think though there's a wrinkle, which is Peter Kim's research suggests that apologies are good for failures of competence, but not for failures of character. You can admit that you didn't know what you were doing. Yeah. Which is what you did. Not, not so helpful to say, you know what?

You're right. I lacked integrity. Or, you're right. I didn't care about you at all, because people doubt that your character is gonna change.

[00:18:31] Malcom Gladwell: Memo to Self in the future. Stay away from saying I was failure of character.

[00:18:37] Adam Grant: I, I'm a big fan of the, the what's the maximum, the best apology is change behavior. Let's shift gears a little bit.

I wanna ask you about something in the book that blew my mind and it's an afterthought. Yeah. But it could have been a whole book. I was so curious about it. Tell me about what you learned about punks and goths.

[00:18:54] Malcom Gladwell: I ran across this book or these papers that had been written by these two sociologists, Anna Mueller and Seth Aberton.

They were people who were studying teen suicide. Someone had called them up once outta the blue and said, oh, you guys study teen suicide. You've gotta come to my town. They go there and they discover it's this perfect. Upper middle class enclave. It is gorgeous. It is got the best high school in the state.

Everyone loves each other. It's a close knit community. And they discovered that this high school at the center of this community had been in the grip of a suicide epidemic for 10 years or more. And it, they couldn't figure out how to stop it. And their conclusion was that one of the problems that led to this suicide epidemic was that the.

High school and the town was a monoculture, that it was a school where there was only one social group that had any kind of standing. And that social group was, I'm a great athlete, I'm an incredible student, I'm super attractive, and I'm gonna go to Penn when I graduate. Right. And that if you didn't fall into that very, very narrow definition of success, you were.

A failure, right? So you set up this situation, and not only that, because it's a monoculture. When one person in that realm tragically takes their own life, it can race through the whole community. There's no natural kind of barrier. Anyway, so I'm talking to Seth Aton, one of the two researchers, and we were comparing our own high school experiences.

'cause like in my high school, there wasn't one social group, there were multiple social groups. And the effect of that was. That everyone who came to the high school could find their own place. Right? So you had the goths and the punks and the jocks and the geeks and the what have you, like the classic fifties high school typology where it doesn't matter how weird or dysfunctional you are, there's a home for you.

And that was Drew my high school. Right? And I suspect it was true of most people's high schools that they're these, and I had always thought of this as a. Problem with my high school. My, my high school was so resolutely not achieving that. 20 people out of my graduating class went to college every year, but I didn't realize the extent to which having multiple different kind of pathways for students would be protective if I asked you.

Off the top of your head, what kind of community or high school would be prone to a suicide epidemic? You would say, oh, it's probably a place where the kids feel isolated and anonymous, where there's no strong sense of community, where there's no support. And their point was this high school was the opposite of that.

It had every support in the world and that's what made it so problematic. It could have been a whole book. This is the, the kind of, be careful what you wish for. Paradox. I think parents moved to that community because they thought they were leaving these kinds of social problems behind, and instead they created an even bigger one.

[00:21:55] Adam Grant: I thought it was shocking also, because we think about building a strong culture, and the idea is we should have no factions, no fault lines. We want everybody to buy into the same values and the same interests. And you're saying, wait a minute. There is a dark side to that kind of uniformity.

[00:22:09] Malcom Gladwell: Some really interesting questions come out of that.

One is, is this kind of diversity that we're talking about, is it specific to high schools or are we talking about something that will be true of all organizations? Do you want your, your army. Battalion to have multiple factions who are, I don't know. I mean, it's, I don't, I don't know the answer to that. I, it's clear to me that it's very, very problematic to have a monoculture.

At a time when kids, adolescents are trying to find their place in the world and come to develop some sense of self,

[00:22:43] Adam Grant: I think that pattern holds at different stages of life. I'm thinking of a baron and henan study of, uh, biotech startups, hundreds of biotech startups where you look at the cultural blueprint that the founder had and some of the founders are hiring on skills.

They wanna know, can you do the job today? Others are looking for star potential. Are you gonna be a genius tomorrow? And then there's some that put culture fit above everything else. And it turns out if founders put culture fit first, their startups are dramatically less likely to fail and significantly less likely, less likely culture fit wins in terms of startups surviving and then going public.

Yeah, but then after they, IPO, the culture fit firms grow at slower rates. And I think what's happening there is early on when you have a really clear mission, it's very helpful to have a bunch of people who are bought into that. But then once you become a bigger organization, you end up too homogeneous and, and you have a lot of groupthink and it becomes harder to change and innovate.

[00:23:32] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah. I come back to this idea a lot in the book and some part of the book trying to understand what we mean by diversity. Diversity is a matter of numbers. It's not just about having people who are different within an ecosystem or a community. It's about having them, people who are different, insufficient numbers such that they can be themselves and can change the culture of the group that they're belonging to.

That notion that diversity is really just about. Numbers about people being present in critical mass is the one idea about diversity that is so routinely ignored and suppressed. People wanna make it about symbolic representation, and symbolic representation is almost as bad as no representation at all.

One thing I've changed my mind about is before writing the book, I was deeply suspicious of the use of quotas in any context. Now I'm like totally down with quotas. Fine deal with it. Like, so I don't understand why we had this aversion to just saying, look. There is a difference between having one woman on a corporate board and having three.

There is a difference between having one non-white person in a community and having five.

[00:24:46] Adam Grant: I wanna talk about this in the context of college admissions, uh, topic that you've never ranted about before and have no controversial views on. Before we do that though, I wa I wanted to, there's a quick aside on the punks and goths in particular

[00:24:57] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah.

[00:24:57] Adam Grant: That I thought was so strange, which is you wrote in the book that people who dress like punks and goths are shy.

[00:25:04] Malcom Gladwell: Yes. Well, this is, I found

[00:25:06] Adam Grant: this

[00:25:06] Malcom Gladwell: completely counterintuitive, so explain it. If you're shy and you look super approachable, people are gonna come up to you and talk to you, and you're gonna be really bummed out, right?

Because you wanna be left alone. The better strategy if you're shy, is to look so outlandish that people avoid you, right? How is that hard?

[00:25:23] Adam Grant: Shyness in psychology is a fear of negative evaluation. Especially by strangers. So if you're afraid that people are gonna judge you negatively, why would you dress in a way that guarantees that they're gonna do that?

[00:25:34] Malcom Gladwell: Oh, no. No. 'cause then you, you take the uncertainty off the table, right? Like, think about it. I'm dressed like this and I'm deeply shy. I'm not. I'm spending my whole time worrying about what does Adam think of this? He think I'm a little geeky, but if I came in in full on, got gear, the uncertainty is gone.

I'm like, I know that Adam. Can't stand the way I'm look so we can get on to other things. We can have a real conversation.

[00:25:58] Adam Grant: You're saying, you're saying that there's a group of people who would rather have certain rejection Yeah. Than face the possibility of not being liked. I,

[00:26:04] Malcom Gladwell: I can't believe I am telling a psychologist this fact.

Absolutely. That's what people do. I mean, that's just kind of, that's just a, is that, that's just a kind of extension on a classic self-sabotaging strategy. Right. That I am so afraid of failing that what do I do? I guarantee my own failure, so I take the issue off the table. I

[00:26:24] Adam Grant: never thought about that socially, only academically and professionally.

[00:26:27] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah,

[00:26:28] Adam Grant: but you're right, it is, it is an extension of self-handicapping,

[00:26:32] Malcom Gladwell: self-handicapping. But I think it's everywhere. It explains so much of the world. In fact, if I had one, if there was one psychological kind of insight that I wanted to take with me to explain the world, it would be that,

[00:26:42] Adam Grant: let's say you're, you're going into a difficult math test and you're afraid of finding out that you weren't smart enough to do it.

So what do you do? You don't start studying until the night before. You don't study at all. And then if you fail you can say, well, I didn't try. And you don't have to face the threat to your fundamental aptitude.

[00:27:01] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah. Yeah. Which is why I think sports are, um, such a useful thing to be engaged in as a kid or any kind of activity where.

Some kind of daily investment is necessary because it is a mechanism for thwarting self handicap. So if you're a member of your high school cross country team, there is a whole ecosystem that is sitting there working to prevent self handicapping on the part of anyone on the team. You go out every day and you run together and you know there's an ethic that says you don't get wasted the night before.

You know, a cross country meet like they really. Take one self-handicapping possibility off after another, off the table. Well, by that

[00:27:45] Adam Grant: logic then, it sounds like you think we should admit lots of athletes to Penn and other Ivy League schools. Well, because they've had a chance to go through those character building experiences,

[00:27:53] Malcom Gladwell: Adam, I think athletics are absolutely essential to being, uh, you know, healthy, fulfilled, whatever human being.

But I don't think you need to be good at it if you're a slow. Miler, you get all the benefits of being a runner that you get if you're a good miler. This fixation with being good at it is just preposterous. No, all the benefits of being an athlete are. The discipline, the camaraderie, the balance to your day, the physical fitness, the, I could go on and on, on, on, on.

You don't have to be good to have any of those advantages. Right.

[00:28:27] Adam Grant: Leave it to our favorite Canadian to replace meritocracy with mediocrity.

[00:28:32] Malcom Gladwell: No, no. Adam, no, no, no, no, no. 'cause I'm also a Mera, I'm a America when it comes to the principle function of universities, which is the education and the, the construction of sophisticated intelligence.

It's not about sports. If Penn wants to decide that what we really want to be is a feeder for all the professional sporting associations of the world, then fine, then it matters. But that's not what your stated of purpose is. You're not, you're, no. Your stated of purpose is to produce a class of intellectuals who go out and change the world.

So don't get distracted by someone's 1500 meter time.

[00:29:06] Adam Grant: I think you have this completely wrong. You have gone on the record saying that the key to success in a career Yeah. Is to be good at things that other people aren't.

[00:29:14] Malcom Gladwell: Well,

[00:29:15] Adam Grant: right. Okay. Right. Did you not just say

[00:29:18] Malcom Gladwell: this, you put it in just

[00:29:21] Adam Grant: I in at the 92nd Street Y

[00:29:23] Malcom Gladwell: in reflecting on my career, yes.

It was my observation in the various stages of my career that one should always zig when other people are Zach.

[00:29:32] Adam Grant: I'll use my own personal example, like the fact that I got halfway decent at springboard diving Yeah. Was not a sign of anything athletic. I think it was an early sign that I had, I guess a little bit of initiative and resourcefulness when I wanted to be an athlete to try enough sports to find one that I actually could stand out at, and then whatever GR it took to get good at that sport.

And those are qualities we want.

[00:29:55] Malcom Gladwell: I know, but Adam, you can learn the exact same qualities of grit and resourcefulness and discipline and still, I. Not be good. I changed my mind on this. When I was in high school. I was a very, very good runner and I was running very good

[00:30:07] Adam Grant: national champion. I was a national champion

[00:30:09] Malcom Gladwell: and I was a running snob and I would look down my nose at anyone who wasn't super fast and I would say, why would they even bother?

Then I quit running for a long time and then in my fifties I joined up with a running group again, and now I was no longer national caliber. Now I was like mediocre, and I realized the beauty of. Mediocrity. Then I realized running was way more fun. I realized I had a connection with everyone else that I never had when I was super good.

And I also realized that every positive ancillary benefit from being an athlete I still got, even though I was mediocre. The universe of people who are super good is this small, right? Why would we get obsessed with this few? This is like the four people who are amazing and neglect the 1000 who can be pretty good and get all the same benefits.

[00:31:03] Adam Grant: We're not saying we should neglect them. I'm just saying that the, one of the better predictors of future behavior is past behavior.

[00:31:09] Malcom Gladwell: Yeah, but no. So when it comes to university admissions, would I do, I think it should be a check mark in your favor. If when you apply to an elite school, you demonstrate that you have participated in some kind of.

Athletic activity that requires discipline. Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. Does that de mean you should deserve a break of admissions? No. And. B, there should be that they should be blinded to your times.

[00:31:36] Adam Grant: Whoa. Hold on, wait a minute. If you take this outside of the sports domain, this, this is absurd.

Just think for a second about like you put down on your, on your college application, I play the saxophone, but you can't actually play a song.

[00:31:50] Malcom Gladwell: It's more complicated with saxophone, and I'm sure that the saxophone gives me the kind of benefits I'm interested in here. Let's put saxophone aside. You don't give.

Admissions breaks and admissions to people in the marching band.

[00:32:01] Adam Grant: Not breaks, but we want to counter their excellence as a signature. Yes. And

[00:32:05] Malcom Gladwell: I do too, but I don't, you don't have, you don't have to be Louis Armstrong to get independent if you play the trumpet.

[00:32:10] Adam Grant: No, no, no. But we also don't want you to be doing this saxophone equivalent of jogging when other people are running.

One beef I have with with your books as a set Yeah. Is I think that sometimes you trick people into thinking that success is gonna come more easily than it does. Okay. You wrote a whole book about how you can think without even thinking you, yeah, that's

[00:32:31] Malcom Gladwell: not what the book was about.

[00:32:32] Adam Grant: You know that. Of course not.

Of course not. But that's part of the hook, the tipping point. Like all you need to do is get to that magic third and then. Yeah, things will change. Even with 10,000 hours in outliers, which I know you have self-corrected a number of times. It's like, okay, if I put in that critical mass, my work is done and then I can coast as an expert.

Do you ever worry that people are taking the wrong message from those high line conclusions?

[00:32:58] Malcom Gladwell: Wow. First of all, I would point out that in all those cases, you're just talking about a title or about a, the discussion I think is a little more nuanced than that. I don't think as a writer, you. You can control how people make sense of your work and nor should you try.

It's not our job when these kinds of books are intended to be kind of conversation starters, to prompt people to think about their world in different ways. If I were to gather together all of the things that people have told me about my books over the years, first of all, the range of things they have said, the range of meanings they have extracted from my books is way, way, way, way wider than I would ever have.

Imagined and many of them were things that I did not think that meaning was explicitly in the book itself. They were taking it and applying it in their own way to their own life. And that is beautiful. And I don't, I, I would never would like to stand in the way of that. I.

[00:33:52] Adam Grant: So it's on the receiver now, not the sender.

[00:33:55] Malcom Gladwell: I believe in recce receiver cultures.

[00:33:57] Adam Grant: Yeah. I think if somebody has a reaction to my book that's different from what I intended, then I wanna learn from that reaction and communicate more clearly next time.

[00:34:04] Malcom Gladwell: I guess I object to the notion that someone who writes a book has a very, very narrow prescription, and if people don't accept that prescription, they failed.

[00:34:13] Adam Grant: You've been doing some fun magic wand experiments on revisionist history. I wanted to give you a magic wand in a few areas and ask what you would do with them. Uh, you're put in charge of the 2028 Olympics. What's the biggest change you're gonna make? The best proposal I've seen so far is Dan Pink who said we should make relays.

Uh, multi-age or multi-age range. So you should have, every relay should have a teenager, a 20 or 30 something, a 40 or 50 something, and one person over 60. Oh, that's a, that's a great idea. I thought that was genius.

[00:34:41] Malcom Gladwell: I think it's time to break up the Olympics. I think it's too much stuff going on at once and we should kind of cut it in half and half Should be on one summer, the other half the other summer.

[00:34:54] Adam Grant: I actually think it's a really good idea 'cause after going to Paris, I thought everyone should go to the Olympics and they should happen every year. Because it's the only place I've gone where people are genuinely rooting for athletes regardless of what country they belong to. If you get to do a constitutional amendment, what would you pick?

[00:35:10] Malcom Gladwell: You know what my favorite magic wand thing? This is not mine. This is my friend Lily has this idea. If there's one thing you could do that you think would have the biggest positive effect on the way we live our lives, she said. Everyone in the world puts their name in a hat and you pull out a, a new name and you have to live in that person's house for a year.

It's fantastic. It's fantastic. So you have no idea where you're gonna end up and you gotta do it for a year. We just scramble a whole system for a year. I mean, obviously. That would mess everything up. But assuming you could do this, don't you think that'd be an incredibly useful exercise? Everyone gets ripped out of their comfort zone for like a year.

[00:35:56] Adam Grant: What, what I like about it is that it forces you to imagine a real life version of the raws and veil of ignorance. So those who aren't raws fans, like the test of how justice society is, was, would you accept a place in it if you didn't know what that place was? It turns out by that standard, they really wanna live in Sweden, not so much the us.

And the idea that you could be dropped into anybody's life, I think makes the, the staggering inequities that we have in this country a little bit harder to stomach.

[00:36:26] Malcom Gladwell: One of the weird things that I've always thought about privileged people, rich people, is the, the asymmetry of complaint. You would think, wouldn't you intuitively that the biggest complainers in society would be those on the bottom and the people would.

Who complained the least will be those on the top right. And you would think that as people acquire wealth and privilege, they should whine less, right? If you have a billion dollars, you should be completely indifferent to your tax rate. You've got a billion dollars. Why do you care what your taxes are?

Right? Or like if you've got a billion dollars, why do you care if someone wants to build an apartment building next to your house? Just buy another house, you have a billion dollars. Right? But this is not what happens. It's the reverse. It strikes me that people in the bottom don't complain that much at all, and all of the complaining takes place at the top.

And the more people, the closer people get to the top, the more they complain. Right? I just, I've never in my life, I remember once reading about this English hedge fund guy who. Super rich, and if he lived in England more than half the year, he would have to pay English taxes. So he went and established his place of permanent residence in like one of those little islands off the Scottish coast.

He was so upset about the prospect of giving up some of his money that he left, and he left his family behind in London and went to live, you know, 160 whatever days a year in like the Shetland Islands or something like that. I just thought that is the stupidest man I've ever met in my entire life. He's, he is rich and has forgotten that fact and is behaving as if he has no money at all and who has organized his entire life around a complaint.

Right. My, the, my point is that making everyone live someone else for a year would I think, solve the asymmetry of complaint problem. Can't they just enjoy the fact that they're rich? Should ask them.

[00:38:26] Adam Grant: I should ask. And it's a kind of that, that is a book I would enjoy seeing you write.

Let's, uh, let's take a few of our audience questions here. One question is, have you ever thought about writing fiction?

[00:38:40] Malcom Gladwell: Yes. I tried to write a screenplay once and it was a disaster, but I enjoyed it and I would like to write a S five thriller 'cause that's all I read.

[00:38:49] Adam Grant: Okay. On spy thrillers. Why I, I heard you say once that sometimes you stop reading before the end.

Oh, all the time. What is wrong with what the whole point of the thriller is to find out the twist at the end.

[00:39:04] Malcom Gladwell: No, no, no, no, no. Yes. The whole point of the thriller, Malcolm, I, I don't think you understand the point of a thriller. No, no, no. Adam, here's way you're wrong. The whole point of a thriller is to.

Delight in the little act of magic that the writer creates at the end of the book with they've set up a puzzle and they resolve it. Right. And what's your, the reason you read your 300 pages to get to the end is you want to participate in that. Magical moment. If you suspect that the magic is not gonna happen, there is only one rational response, and that's the bail.

Get off the train. The the train is gonna crash. Get off the train. I. I could not disagree more strongly. You finish things even though you think it's gonna be a disaster.

[00:39:53] Adam Grant: No, I get off the train on page 20. I don't read 295 pages and then say, well, now I've realized

[00:40:00] Malcom Gladwell: No, I'm much more hopeful than you. Also, I suspend,

[00:40:02] Adam Grant: but wait, wait.

No, no. What? Why? Why would you trust the author for 295 pages and then say, me, I, you lost me. I'm not gonna do the last part. No,

[00:40:09] Malcom Gladwell: because the hard thing is the last 10 pages. Right. They can, it could still, there could still be a possibility that this magic could happen on page two 90. It's still real, but it, but there comes a point where you're like, oh, it's not, no, it's not happening.

Like when they kill off a character, who, in your own mind, you're thinking this person is central to the, to the, I've invested deeply in this character. Are you the guy who gets up in the middle in the beginning of a movie and walks out?

[00:40:36] Adam Grant: It depends how bad the movie is.

[00:40:38] Malcom Gladwell: Wow, Adam, you pull the trigger quick on these things.

[00:40:44] Adam Grant: I mean, why would you waste your time? There are lots of great books in movies. It's an hour wait. It's the next time. Says the person who's complaining that your biggest regret is you don't have enough time. I. All right. Couple other things that I think I have to ask you about here. How does a high achiever dis-identify with accomplishment?

How do you stop basing your ego and your identity on success?

[00:41:05] Malcom Gladwell: That's a really good question and a serious question. There's gonna be a point where you're not going to have the same success as you had when you were younger and you had to figure out how you're gonna deal with that. And it, it is, trust me, I think about this all the time.

I, I think it is the, it's the central question of getting old. If you belong to multiple social worlds, you have way better defenses against that kind of defeat. So if you have a terrible day at work, you still have the choir you belong to and you still have your kids. If you have multiple social worlds, you have multiple ways of getting.

And if you have one world and it's just work, when that goes badly, you have nothing. Right? I guess one response is I need to develop. More worlds as I get older to kind of defend myself against the inevitable dimming of the day.

[00:41:55] Adam Grant: I, I should say, that tracks also with the psychology of the self. I think about self-affirmation theory.

I think about self complexity theory. Huge body is of research showing that if you put all your eggs in one identity basket, if that basket spills over, then it's devastating. Whereas if you have a diverse set of values and groups and goals, then it's a lot easier to tolerate a threat to one of them.

[00:42:16] Malcom Gladwell: Look at my, my mother, who is 93 years old and is doing fabulously. That's the story of her life. She's actually a very interesting case study because she's an identical twin and her twin stayed in Jamaica and had a relatively, a much narrower and less dense, uh, social world just by virtue of living in Jamaica.

My mother constructed for herself in Canada, a very, very dense social world. They're both exactly the same age. They are identical. When I was a kid, I confused them. That's how identical they are. My aunt is suffering from dementia, quite advanced. My mother, you know, she, if you talk to her, you'd think you're talking to a 40-year-old.

My mother had always had multiple social worlds to sustain her, and when one fell away, she added another. I don't think it was conscious, but I think she understood on some level that that is what it means to be healthy in the world.

[00:43:11] Adam Grant: What's the idea of yours that you've written about, that you live by the most and least

[00:43:15] Malcom Gladwell: that I've written about.

I once did a podcast episode where I was talking about lists, and I have a list. I only ever drink five liquids, milk, water, tea, espresso based beverages, and red wine. That's it. I never deviate and people made a lot of fun of me for this, but I believe this very strongly. Things like that. Arbitrary acts of self-discipline are enormously clarifying.

Everyone else, when you go to a restaurant, they're like, oh, what should I have? Do you wanna have a drink? I don't want to have a drink. Should I have this? I'm like, it's totally clear. If it's two o'clock, I'm having a cappuccino. If it's dinner, I'm having a glass of wine. If it's, you know, morning, I'm having teeth.

You know when you stand behind a person in the coffee shop and they, it's their turn to order and they act like it's never even occurred to them, what they might order. This drives me. Bananas. Just take some disorganized corner of your life that you don't have strong feelings about and just create an arbitrary decision structure and stick to it.

It's fantastic. So that's, I do live my life on that.

[00:44:22] Adam Grant: What's something you'll never change your mind about?

[00:44:25] Malcom Gladwell: Never change my mind around bad. Uh, I don't know. It's very hard to say. How can I say that? I don't, why would you take a stand like that? No, I, I don't think there's, I don't think there's anything I wouldn't change my mind.

How,

[00:44:42] Adam Grant: well, I don't, I don't wanna call you formulaic or predictable, but I did write down no, as my expected response to that question,

[00:44:49] Malcom Gladwell: I will never change my mind about the observation, the belief that my daughters are cute. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Adam. Thank you as always.

[00:45:06] Adam Grant: Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, the show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced in mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah, Kingsley Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Han Sale, Sue and Allison Layton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Highl, Ben Ben Chang, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

[00:45:38] Malcom Gladwell: I got really fixated at one point with looking at the members of the, uh, Caltech track and field team. And what is hilarious is Caltech has

[00:45:48] Adam Grant: a track team.

[00:45:49] Malcom Gladwell: Caltech has a track team, so in, in your universe, Ivy league universe, uh, the track team is filled with people who are very, very, very, very good. There's a guy who goes to Harvard right now who is a world-class, 5,000 meter runner, and my point is.

Why is he there? Like, why does Harvard need to have a world class fight? He, I look on his Strava. He's, he's just running all the time.

I.