Malcolm Gladwell

Why do you focus your considerable talents on these rather middling subjects?

Well, because I'm middling. The things in the middle are the interesting things. You know, I always use the example of cars. I'm a huge car lover. But a Ferrari is actually, at the end of the day, not interesting. Because if I give you a million dollars, you really should make an interesting car. Not that hard to fail at the task. If I give you 10,000 pounds and ask you to make an interesting car, that's an incredibly difficult proposition. So I'm also drawn to the things that I think are the most kind of interesting and complex explorations.

Do you think of yourself primarily as a writer or as a thinker?

Oh, I think of myself as a storyteller. What I've tried to do in many of my books is to bring insights from social science or history and use stories as a way of exploring those ideas. But the you know, to wrap something in a story is to give it a kind of power that it wouldn't otherwise have.

Where does your confidence come from? Is it just your belief in your own intellectual rigor and capability?

Does it take confidence? Or I just sort of felt like I had nothing to lose. The only thing you have to lose is to be perceived as uninteresting. What an audience wants is to be taken seriously. They're willing to put up with a lot if they have the sense that you have thought about what you're doing with them in some kind of considered way. Once they get that sense from you, they will travel with you in many far and distant directions. What turns off an audience is the notion that you're giving them the same talk that you have given to you-you didn't even think about them when you were thinking about that morning what you wanted to say. As long as I communicate that notion that you are special to me, I'm giving you this talk for a reason, then you're fine.