Like many of the Big-C creatives in Gardner's book, Gladwell's early career did not necessarily indicate his later stardom. In his work at Insight on the News and The Washington Post, he reported on events in business and science as they happened in typical journalistic fashion. In Gladwell's own words, "There are serious limitations on how deep you can go with a newspaper story." It wasn't until he snagged a job at the New Yorker, and his articles were required to be longer, that his unique analytical style began to take shape.
His turning point was the day he was assigned to write a piece on a Central Park jogger who was brutally beaten by multiple unknown aggressors. Disliking the intrusive interview style many journalists employ to get stories from witnesses and family members, he sat down for about an hour and a half with the jogger's surgeon. Out of this interview came a piece that was less about the beating and more about "practice variation in medicine" or the idea that doctors separated by geography tend to go about treatment very differently from one another. This tangential, interconnected style of writing is what Gladwell is known for today. In the following quote, he discusses the development of this style:
"I'm not a very deep interviewer, so when I interview someone, I interview them for an hour and a half. I never do more than that. Everyone else does like, you know, at least, they embed themselves for several weeks. I could no more do that then I could go to the moon... If I'm gonna write about person X, they can occupy about 25 percent of the piece and I can fill the other 75 percent with ruminations on what they mean, or with a digression that ultimately helps you understand the person more."
What may seem in some disciplines as a detrimental inability to focus, Gladwell was given the reigns by the New Yorker to explore his thought patterns fully. He went on to master the art of the digression in his six subsequent books and four seasons of his podcast, Revisionist History. The throughline in all of these works is the method of explanation through anecdote, tangential study, and rejection of tradition. In my opinion, this is his great creative achievement in the world of academic thought. I use the term "academic thought" because I can't quite pinpoint the focus of Gladwell's work; he incorporates a variety of different fields like philosophy, psychology, sociology, criminology, business development, and STEM. I believe that he is Big-C because I don't think there's a good example of another creative whose scope is so broad and whose work reaches such a wide audience.
Because his writing involves an inventive use of theory, he often finds that he is wrong. His finished product, especially his podcasts, tends to be a work in progress. I find a lot of similarities between Jonah Lehrer's article and Gladwell's creative process. The anomalies and inconsistencies that can be overlooked by the scientific mind are the exact subjects of Gladwell's study. It seems as though Step 2 of Lehrer's "How to Learn From Failure" (assuming that the failure in question is some societal notion, not a personal failure of Gladwell's) is the moment in which Gladwell presents his findings to the public, either through his podcast or his books. The reading public is his proving ground for his theories.
Here is my recommendation for the reader: listen to a few of Gladwell's podcast episodes while traveling home for Thanksgiving, or once you get home, dust off the copy of Outliers you got your Dad for Christmas that he never read. You'll thank me later.
I really enjoyed the way you highlighted the component of divergent thinking Gladwell's creative process employs. It seems to me he almost stumbled into the process of creating some of his products, rather than being struck by some kind of insight.
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