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1963
Pop Sociology
From one extreme we go to another, from Sir Alex Ferguson who didn’t start until he was nearly 40, to Malcolm Gladwell, who was on the road to success before he hit 40. Gladwell is almost a premature PG-40er who was close to, and almost on the wrong side of the line I’m using, when he made it. Still we won’t hold near-precociousness against him and we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t take the opportunity to learn from his life and experiences.
Born in 1963, Gladwell graduated in history and kicked off his career as a writer at The American Spectator. He spent nine years as a science writer and New York bureau chief for The Washington Post before joining The New Yorker in 1996 as a staff writer, a post he stills holds down today. His beat at The New Yorker has been wide ranging and eclectic with a tendency to write on “pop sociology”. Apart from spreading his name, his writing in The New Yorker led to the American Sociological Association’s Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues for “his contributions to The New Yorker which expound and elaborate in novel ways the works and ideas of distinguished sociologists”.
However, in the public eye Gladwell is famous for the stunning success of his three books The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, all dealing with contemporary issues and all drawing on a wide range of social science research. The sales of these three non-fiction books from someone known only for writing outside the world of books have been astonishing. When interviewed on the launch of Outliers, his third book, which hit bookshops in 2008, his first two books had reportedly sold two million copies each in the USA alone.
There is no doubt that Gladwell’s own professional “tipping point”, his personal breakthrough moment, was when his literary agent was able to sell The Tipping Point for a reported US$1 Million. There should be absolutely no doubt in any reader’s mind about the significance of that deal; I speak from my own experience in touting PG-40 to number of “agents”. To a man, and a woman, they told me flatly that there is no chance of a non-fiction deal on any terms, let alone for US$1 Million, unless the author is already famous or had a “platform”. So how did Gladwell manage it?
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