Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is the writer of books and for New Yorker Magazine. His books are generally categorized under the category of “Self-improvement”. However, in my opinion, he is not one of that self-improvement trashes. You can see that he does really research for his books. Just take a look into his “cites”. Even this made him different them from those I called trash. He is not putting an exact way on you, he does not tell you what to do, as if you are beginning to use a new software on your computer.
He just narrates the stories and researches the reasons behind them, then convey you those as they are. And so readers can take parts of his writings which work for themselves. In Eric Jaffe’s article, “Malcolm in the Middle” which can be found in www. psychologicalscience. org; he answered when asked for the process behind his writing “I have two parallel things I’m interested in. One is, I’m interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I’m interested in collecting interesting research.
What I’m looking for is cases where they overlap. ” Susan Salter Reynold staff writer in Los Angeles Times in her review titled “’What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures’ by Malcolm Gladwell” defines Malcolm Gladwell’s writing skill with as “This is not journalism. It is not self-help. It is not sociology. In many ways, Gladwell’s writing has more in common with those explorers and scientists. There’s Gladwell, digging away. His head pops out of the hole, an archaeologist parsing a culture that failed thousands of years ago.
“They revered youthful genius! ” this fictional Gladwell exclaims. “They believed in the eternal life of the written word! ” “They confused puzzles and mysteries! ” “They ate only one brand of ketchup! . . . No wonder they perished! “” He has 4 books which are The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009). His ideas in his books, columns and in his speechs are generally known but non-anatomised ones enough.
Actually he sells known ideas by garnishing them and making them different. As seen his speech “Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce” done for TED, he knows the importance of diversifying of things and how it affects people’ real decision. He uses people’ secret wants and concerns they don’t even know before facing it. This is also what he does in his books. And the most important point: He does it in an entertaining way. Tim Adams, a writer in Observer column of The Guardian in his interview with Malcolm G.
Titled “The man who can’t stop thingking”summerized this qualification of him like that: “There is nothing new in this theory, but Gladwell’s gift for interdisciplinary cross-dressing once again makes it look extremely fashionable. He has a genius – one no doubt due to many social factors – for making everything he writes seem like an impossible adventure. ” I think this side of him consists of the main frame of his originality of ideas, business sense and hsinpresentation style. He knows how to inspire people by narrating exact stories well in a way of adding his narrating academical and philosphical soul.
Praticality of his ideas is actually highly pratical. As seen his aforementioned speech for TED, his ideas basically derived from real stories. He actually examines and analyses pratically experimented ideas and creating theories for them. This speech also shows his sense of business. The impact of his ideas underlies the amount of people inspired from him, and this can be figured out by how many people follows him. As written at the beginning he is an award-winning writer, and loyalty of his followers considerably high.
It can be understood by looking the amount of his books sold, how many people come to watch when he gives a speech, and to what places he is invited to share his ideas, how much media takes his ideas into accounts and publish them by knowing how loyalty his followers, and what academicians tells about him. I can not imagine a business department in a modern university which one of his books is not suggested. Rigor of his research may be called as controversial for some. However he never says “this is what exactly the truth is”.
Instead he research exact researches and combines them. According to me by following this method he makes his rigor of research highly trustful. His ability of written communication of course very well, not even need to discuss. His job and his books among bestsellers is higly enough to prove it. The level of his international outlook can be understood by looking how many different languages his book translated to and how many they sold. Definitely brilliant. I think Malcolm Gladwell meets Thinkers 50’s criterias in a saturater mean.
