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Adam Grant organizational psychologist here at Wharton delighted to interview Malcolm Gladwell my favorite author
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malcome welcome thank you uh welcome too yeah so let's let's start talking about
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your latest Blockbuster David and Goliath give us the the core message and idea for you well it's just an
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examination of um of the idea of Advantage um and particularly looking at when we when we see asymmetrical
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conflict conflicts between one very large and one not so large party um how do we account
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for the unusual numbers of successes that underdogs have in those situations and that sort of the book s of takes off
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from there to try and figure out whether our assumptions about what makes for an
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advantage are accurate could we just be wrong about who the has the advantage in
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the first place so we've labeled somebody an underdog in fact they're not
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or is it more complicated than that well I mean I the the opening Story chapter in the book is about the
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actual uh retelling of the biblical story of David and Goliath and there it's very clear David is not in any
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sense the underdog properly understood once he has decided to change the rules of the conflict the sling in his hand is
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of is such a devastating weapon that no contemporary Observer of that battle would have thought David was a long shot
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they would have once they realized he was winding up with his sling um they would have realized that that he was he
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had he had all of the cards um so there is some of that that we're we're misled
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by the narrowness of our assumptions about um what constitutes an advantage in a given situation and that that plays
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out in a wide range of circumstances in the book so talk to us a little bit about desirable difficulties yeah so I
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there's this that's a notion taken straight from the psychological literature from the work of borks at
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UCLA and they were interested that in the context of learning theory about it is not always the case that if I make
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the task of of learning something easier for you that your uh performance will improve there are sometimes cases where
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your performance will improve if I make the task of learning more difficult for you not always but they're what they do
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is they draw a line between uh uh difficulties that are ultimately desirable those that are not
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and so I sort of play with that idea in a number of contexts and sort of figure out are there cases when having dyslexia
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is a desirable difficulty that is to say where you end up being better off than you were before and the answer is there
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is a small number of cases um where it's plainly the case that or at least according to those who
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have dyslexia and who have achieved enormous success particularly entrepreneurs are those that's the group
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that's most interesting here we see so many entrepreneurs who have dyslexia and when you talk to them they will tell
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you they succeeded not in spite of their dis disability but because of it and so
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for them they view their disability as desirable um ultimately and that's interesting um and that is a very that
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suggests that there are uh profoundly there's a that the distribution of responses to uh an obstacle are B
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profoundly bodal and I think we spend we we pretend they're not um similarly I look at uh the this weird
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association between very successful people and having lost a parent fact of having lost a parent in childhood not a
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desirable difficulty uh for some for some small number of people parental loss appears to be ultimately a
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desirable difficulty um again not a large number but um it's sort of a that there does seem to be a
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class of of uh a class of obstacles that for some people for whatever reason have
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a uh uh uh have an advantageous outcome where do you draw the line so what what is it that differentiates people who end
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up on one side of the distribution versus those For Whom the obstacle is just insurmountable uh I think it's you can't
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draw a bright line um it's not really a perfect I mean we can speculate for example if you look at the class of of
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dyslexics who end up as successful entrepreneurs they obviously have certain things in common they are they
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tend to be highly intelligent um in the I interviewed maybe a dozen of them and in every case
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almost every case uh the successful dyslexic had one family member who uh always believed in
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them so if you maybe one way of saying is okay so if if you if one of the if your only
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obstacle is dyslexia then it could be desirable but if we say so a child who grows up in a low income neighborhood
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who has a average IQ who has a uh troubled family life and has dyslexia it's not going to be desirable you've
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got too many obstacles to deal with but if we start limiting the number of obstacles then maybe it's different so
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that's one idea that perhaps it's the just a kind of sheer um another has to do with attitude I
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mean for whatever reason some people choose to interpret their circumstances differently um there was a when I was in
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one of the chapters I would interview this it's all about a a famous oncologist named am frar who has a
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dezian childhood and then goes on to achieve enormous things as an oncologist and there was a moment in my
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conversation with him when he describes this just horrendous childhood and so he
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says he says so there I am am I'm 16 years old and I'm wildly optimistic and
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you realize it was a complete uncor but not for him so he was just someone who for whatever reason you know he was
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orphaned he was grow up in poverty on the streets he was you know the whole thing is just but he was just like he
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just thought that was an occasion to look on the bright side so where does that come from I have no idea well and I
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think one of the ways that you bring that to light is is to invoke this personality trait of disagreeableness
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something with which I struggle and I know you have commented is not your Forte as well how does that figure into
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the story well it's the it's this idea it's a wonderful psychologist at UFT who
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had University of Toronto called Jordan Peterson who had a long conversation with about this who sort of says if you
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look at the Big Five personality traits he thinks that entrepreneurs are characterized by openness which is
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obvious creativity conscientiousness again obvious diligence but he thinks that that that they are disagreeable
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that is to say they are not people who require the social approval of their peers in order to um and I think he
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makes a very compelling argument and I I I sort of I agree with that topology erotically erotically yeah um that there
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is something uh that if you're going to do something truly Innovative you have
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to be someone who doesn't value uh social approval you can't need social approval to go forward otherwise
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how would you ever do the thing you're doing right and I'm you know I was I
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give the story example in my book of ingar comprad the founder of Ikea one of the great entrepreneurs of the 20th
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century who does you know he at a crucial point in building Ikea in the middle of the Cold War he starts
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Outsourcing to Poland which is just like an unthinkable act in 1961 it's like
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building a it would be like Outsourcing to North Korea to day you would have to have you know so much audacity to do
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that and you could imagine imagine if the head of Walmart said we're we're
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going to start uh sourcing from North Korea it would just be a you know well that's what you you have to be comprad
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who by the way is dyslexic is just one of those people who' like it just doesn't bother him I mean he he wasn't
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someone to or if he lost sleep about it he was more concerned about the health of his company than he was about his
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public reputation mhm and that to be able to do that is not easy at all and I think I see that trait though time and
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time again in in innovators so we've talked a little bit then about some of the advantages of
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disadvantages let's let's flip this to the other side so a couple years ago
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Barry Schwarz and I sort of noticed as we looked across lots of different studies that in almost every domain we
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could find there was too much of a good thing yeah that everything that we thought might be valuable whether it's
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practice or generosity or you know pretty much any virtue sort of if you got too much of it turn negative how
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does that figure into the story of David and Goliath well that you know that paper you guys wrote was uh hugely I
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gave you a little shout out in the book it was hugely little shout out thank you
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no it was hugely influential my thinking I read that paper and I was like it's
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such a kind of it's one of those it's it's the it's the best kind of insight
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it is the most obvious it's the thing your mom told you right which is there's
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such a thing of too much of a good thing right but it's also the thing that we
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cannot wrap our minds around it's just there seems to be we can we understand
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linear relationships we understand diminishing marginal returns we cannot understand the idea of the inverted U
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that the same thing that's positive at one level can turn negative at the other
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with hugely deletar consequences I think um and I think that's the mistake that
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people in positions of privilege make it's what Dooms the favorite is the favorite assumes that they can extend
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their advantages indefinitely that if what makes me better than you at the beginning is that I have more resources
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that if I keep spending resources I'll always be ahead of you and it's just not
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true you know General Motors is not a better company a more Nimble Innovative company when it's the biggest when it's
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you know at the height of its of its size and dominance in the 1970s it's in
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fact in profound decline Microsoft is not more Innovative today than it was when it was a fraction of its size um
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there are numerous um the American Healthcare System is not better than other Healthcare Systems in the world by
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virtue of the fact that we spend 50% more per patient in fact it's I think you can almost very clearly make the
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argument our Healthcare System is as bad as it is because we spend so much money
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um so there's a I don't know it's a sort of um I once I gave a talk once at
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Columbia psychology department when I was writing my book in which I presented the and I asked the audience since they
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were all psychologist said give me reasons why we struggle with the inverted you like and it's it's very
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that would gave me like so people just emailed them in I got like 50 of them but it's a really you know is it because
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on some evolutionary level for most of our history there was because we never could get too much of a good thing we
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never got to that part of the curve if you're living on the Savannah and there's a drought every three months
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there's no such thing as too much food right so maybe that's just so baked into
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our system um that maximizing Surplus is the only way to get through life um that
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when you're in a world where all of a sudden Surplus is um not just attainable
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but Surplus in in the Western World Surplus is a condition of our life um that we're just woefully unequipped on
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some level for uh dealing with that it's interesting though because we we're in
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the Observer position we have a different reaction so we don't want to be the underdog necessarily but we love
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to root for the underdog dog yeah why well I think this is paradoxical for the following reason um I understand on one
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level why and that is because uh it is a way in which it's a version of the of the just World hypothesis it
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is that the world seems more just to us if material advantage does not um automatically translate to um dominance
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right so we need the belief that those without obvious resources can win in order for the world to seem fair for the
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rest for those of us who most of us since most of us are not in position to power for those of us who are not
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position of power to feel we have a chance right so there's that but the Paradox is of course this is slightly
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tongue and cheek it's why I don't cheer for the underdog and that is that uh in
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a contest between a favorite and an underdog the if the underdog loses the underdog feels very little um distressed
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because they expected to lose if the favorite loses he feels a great deal of distress because every expectation said
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he was supposed to win the empathetic position then as an observer is to cheer for the favorite right because if your
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if your job as an as as a empathic human being is to want to minimize human Suffering The Suffering comes when the
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favorite wi loses right so I I remember as a kid watching in sports you know I I
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remember it was one of the Olympic Games and I was cheering for a I'm a big track
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person for an athlete who was one of my favorites who was favorite to win and he
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lost and I realized in that moment that the pain he felt was so much greater than the pain that you know that the
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those who never thought they were going to win would have felt had they lost that there was no from then on I felt I
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have no choice as a human being but to root for the for the favorite there's
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something to that actually it is weird because rooting for the underdog requires that we um be
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indifferent to the emotional distress of the person who expected to win potentially or is it that we expect the
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joy to the underdog and those rooting to outweigh the distress to the favorite well yes so this is interesting this
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gives you an insight into my psychology I'm far more distress avoidant than I am
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Joy uh seeking so bad is really stronger than good for you as it so often is and
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psychology yeah the I I'm the fact that the underdog is Happy means very little
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to me next to the distress of the of the favorite okay but you're right you're
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right you could have a completely actually it's so weird I had never even framed it that way that's how distress
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distress oriented I am well let's build on that distress then and say you know I
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one of the things that was striking to me about David and Goliath is the courage it took to in some ways
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challenge one of the core messages of of outliers where you know I walked away from outliers with this deep distress is
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a good word for it around how these early advantages that just could come even from a birthday just build on
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themselves and accumulate and create this massively unfair set of circumstances yeah and then here you
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come in with David and Goliath and say wait a minute what you thought was an advantage is actually a disadvantage in
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vice versa how do you think about the reconciliation of those two well I don't
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worry too much uh about there is some sense in which uh davidl is an addendum to outliers it simply says let's let's
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uh complicate our understanding of Advantage there is some sense in which David and is a rebuke a mild rebuke to
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some of the more sweeping conclusions of outliers I'm fine with that I sort of
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think um you know no book is the last word on any subject and then and I you know uh you should as a writer at least
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partially contradict yourself um on a routine basis if you're G to remain interesting um you know you've got to
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like uh I mean you think there's a great moment in um you know when dick nisbit he makes a turn in his career as
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a psychologist where he goes from remember he thinks the fundamental attribution era in the beginning is
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fundamental yeah and then he realizes actually no it's cultural and he do and
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he puts that and it doesn't refute the fundamental attribution ER it deepens
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our understanding of it to say oh actually it has roots in Western culture but you see a very different and
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actually then he writes that book about East West which is incredibly fascinating so he gets two great books
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out of going back and going over and correcting his earlier position that to me is uh the model for how um you ought to
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behave in the intellectual World which is I think you should always double back and say well no wait a minute this is
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more complicated here we can kind of and contradiction is too strong a word it's
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but you should you should be constant revising your conclusions I think I think that's that's a mark of of an
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intellectual to to constantly be asking the questions as opposed to just fixing on an answer um it's it's interesting
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though because as as a social scientist and as a writer and very much inspired by your work I've been waiting for
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somebody to go around and do the the story of how Malcolm Gladwell generates his ideas and I'm curious if someone
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were to follow you from the Inception to you know sort of picking a story or identifying a study to the full book
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what what happens along the way well I don't really know I mean sometimes I start uh you know there are about five
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or six times a year I go to the NYU library and I spend a couple days um just browsing is too mild a term but
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wandering around going through millions of journals in the most sort of serendipitous way I can just to kind of
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see what's out there and see if I can stumble on something without without a
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clear goal or Direction just no goal whatsoever so there's that I do as a regular basis and then I I do a fair
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amount of speaking and I always try and have conversations with people well outside my world so today I gave a talk
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this morning um and in Philadelphia and I was talking to a guy one of the guys there was runs a uh medical devices
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company very very small one and so I started talking to him about because I've always had this idea of head that
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it would be really really fun to write to compare the way uh dogs are treated with the way humans are treated in it
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because they're not that dissimilar um as problems for medical science but if the but the the the
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systems that surround doggy Healthcare and human Healthcare are profoundly different right so you know uh the same
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devices are used in various you know hip B PL so they're not same but analogist
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devices um only you do a complex knee surgery on your dog at $7,000 and you do it on a human being it's 100 now is a
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human really uh 15 times more complex than a dog when it comes to no so there's something but anyway this I sort
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of had this vague thought and then I met this guy and so I started asking about this and he sort of started riffing on
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it and gave me his card now that's sort of how it works you know what I mean
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like you take advantage of a little thought you had in your head and when you meet someone by accident who happens
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to have specialized knowledge you make sure you get his card so that's sort of
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the it's it's fascinating to think about it being so nonlinear right no it's
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different from although I suspect a lot of academic work is um I think it it uh that that the it's not the nonlinearity
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and the Serendipity of it is what uh makes it fun and it if it's too organized it it could fall flat on the
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page I think my books to feel like there is a random element in my books I mean there's supposed to be kind of like
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these kind of accidental wanderings through the world um there's not supposed to be a grand plan and if there
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did I think it would feel a little less um uh would it would lose some of the books would Lop some of their life so I
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guess to to spin off of that then one one of the other things that's that's
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always interesting is you know you've done five books now what has changed about the way that you think about the
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world and particularly since this is a Wharton conversation about the world of of work and leadership in
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organizations I guess I have more respect for the diversity of I realize now that an effective
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leader or manager can come in a virtually infinite number of forms um I have way more respect for the
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kind of heterogeneity of Excellence um and that's a took a long time to because it's so tempting
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to try and paint a very specific picture of what you think um effective say leadership is or what an effective
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organization looks like and now i' you know I've sort of the older I get and
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the more I sort of see I realize no they come in they have some high performers of one sort or another have certain
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things in common but they're almost more distinguished by what they don't have in
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common than what they do and it's understanding fit to me as a much more important issue than
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defining um than defining the characteristics of Excellence is understanding the combination of
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individual and organization and what um and why at different points in your life
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cycle you might want a very very different kind of person um it's funny how the in the be the purest example of
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this is in sports where uh the notion of fit between the athletes that you have and
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the coach that you hire is only occasionally considered in you know and I you'll always read that they they'll
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say you know they brought in such and such a coach whose plotting style is ill suited to the athletes that he has and
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then you wonder so then why did they bring in a coach thought about it why are you why why do a plotting style if
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no one on your team wants to play the plotting style so there is this kind of it's interesting how hard that notion is
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to maybe it's because it's just it renders the task of defining what you
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want uh a lot more complicated and we we'd rather not deal with that I suppose
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I think that that's one of the the fundamental contributions that you've
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made to the world is to take people who have very simple ideas and get them to complicate them and question them and
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turn them upside down yeah uh to close on this one what idea have you put out into the world that you think has been
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most misunderstood that you would like to set the record straight on well there quite a lot I get misunderstood a fair
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amount um uh that's an interesting thought I am sometimes accused the only the the thing that uh
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uh that is said about my work that irritates me the most is that I cherry-pick and I don't think I do at
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all um or at least I don't think I think I do what everyone does when they construct an argument which is we
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require those who construct arguments to do a reasonable survey of the literature
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and and um choose those uh choose that evidence that is most relevant to their argument now that
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doesn't mean that is in agreement with their argument but rather it's relevant
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to their argument you have to sift and I think I sift like anyone else sips but for some reason that's become a
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kind of um uh that's become a kind of cliche about my work that I'm that I kind of um
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simply zero in on things that Accord with my my preconceptions and but I don't think I do at all I think I I try
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to be pretty good about um so there's that and then there's people have simplified the 10,000 hours thing
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ridiculously I've never said that 10,000 hours was was sufficient to achieve
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Mastery and that's been people have caricatured that claim over and over again to my
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distress yeah I think certainly for me it's it's an interesting example that
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challenges us to think differently about expertise and I think part of of what's
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so exciting about David and Goliath is it shows just how clearly you are willing to say look you know there's one
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side of our argument but wait there is another side of an argument so uh I think that's a that's a great case for
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saying look the world is a lot messier than we think it is yeah so thank you for joining us today thank you
00:24:50
[Music] Adam [Music]