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Tim FerrissMalcolm Gladwell Interview (Full Episode) | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Malcolm Gladwell on Storytelling, Questions, Running, Failure, and Unconventional Beliefs
- Gladwell explains that writing is mostly thinking and organizing, with his newspaper background eliminating writer's block, and he describes transcribing interviews himself and pruning them repeatedly to find what's interesting.
- He describes how his podcast Revisionist History grew out of a single teenager's story into three linked episodes, and how audio lets him generate emotion in ways print cannot.
- He credits his father's fearless habit of asking obvious questions as the source of his own curiosity, and says his sloppiness and impatience are flaws he constantly compensates for by investing more time.
- His daily routine involves a minimal breakfast, three websites, and writing in noisy public places before lunch, followed by running, which he admires for its mix of training restraint and racing abandon.
- He shares strong opinions, including that college obsession is bad advice, that young people should leave North America for somewhere real, that difficult cases make bad law, and that he believes in ghosts.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasWriting is mostly thinking, not typing
Gladwell says a book is about 20% writing and 80% organization and logistics, and that for every hour of writing he spends three hours thinking about it. His ten years at newspapers also left him with no tolerance for writer's block.
Finding what's interesting is the writer's core skill
He transcribes interviews himself, deletes dead space, and prunes repeatedly until he nearly knows the interview by heart. He says this ability to see the story in raw material is what a writer is paid for.
Start with a nugget and walk around it
Gladwell's Revisionist History episodes about a gifted South Central teenager led to episodes on how colleges find such kids and how philanthropy funds them. He also interrupts interviewees to make them elaborate on points they skip over as old hat.
Fearless dumb questions are a superpower
Gladwell learned this from his father, who has no intellectual insecurity and keeps asking until he understands. He imagines his father repeating 'I don't understand' to Bernie Madoff until he walked away.
Compensating for flaws shapes who you are
Gladwell calls himself sloppy and impatient and says he forces himself to invest more time and ask more questions. He argues that measuring someone's natural inclinations misses what they do to compensate for them.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesWriting is only, writing a book is maybe 20% writing and 80% organization, logistics. For every hour I spend writing, I spend three hours thinking about writing.
— Malcolm Gladwell
When you observe or measure someone's natural inclinations, you haven't got a picture of them because you don't know what they do with those natural inclinations, right?
— Malcolm Gladwell
There are interesting kids everywhere, and it's only in our snobbery that we have decided that interestingness is defined by your test scores.
— Malcolm Gladwell
Going to Florence does not expand your horizons. Go somewhere real, right?
— Malcolm Gladwell
Human beings are resilient. They recover.
— Malcolm Gladwell
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
