- I'm not out to convert the world.
No interest in so doing.
I just simply want people to engage with my ideas.
And if they disagree, fine.
I feel like we learn most from people at the fringes.
And that's why you constantly have
to be looking at the fringes.
You do not want to be cornered by me at a cocktail party.
It's just the worst.
That's a really bad idea.
- Hello Believe Nation.
I'm Evan Carmichael.
My one word is believe
and I believe that entrepreneurs are going to solve
all of the major problems of the world.
So to help you on your journey,
today we're going to learn from journalist
and five times New York Times Best Selling Author,
Malcolm Gladwell.
And my take on his top ten rules for success Volume two.
Rule number one is my personal favorite
and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best.
And as always guys, as you're watching,
if you hear something that really resonates with you,
please leave it down in the comments below.
Put quotes around so other people can be inspired.
And when you write it down,
it's much more likely to stick for yourself as well.
Enjoy.
(inspirational music)
- Pursue what interests you, not what you're good at.
You're always better off pursuing the things you like
over the things that you have some kind of aptitude toward.
At the end of the day, passion for something
gets you much further than some dry notion of ability.
What I'm trying to get people to understand is
that our conventional notions of disadvantage and advantage
aren't accurate.
That we've called lots of things disadvantages
when in fact, it's more complicated than that.
And so, the reason I started with that story and also,
I retell the story of David and Goliath, to start the book
because if you look at the story closely,
everything you think was a disadvantage about David
actually isn't.
And Goliath is not what he looks like.
He looks like this indomitable giant.
In fact,
he probably had a medical condition called acromegaly,
which is, this is sort of a side thing.
- You're bringing medicine in the Bible dude.
What are you doing? - No, no, no.
- It is hilarious because if you,
the minute you start digging into these things,
you discover these little pockets have been arguing
about these things for years.
For 50 years, endocrinologists have been arguing about
whether Goliath had a tumor on his pituitary gland
and, which would explain his height
because when you have a tumor on your pituitary gland,
you overproduce human growth hormone
- and get really.. - Right
Andre the giant - Right.
- Had this condition.
- Seven foot, four, a beast.
- Seven foot, four.
But one of the side effects is
that it can constrict your optic nerves
and leave you largely with very, very limited eye sight.
So one of the explanations
for why Goliath behaved so strangely
and why he doesn't perceive
that David is not intending to fight him.
I mean, David comes down the mountain
and he's got no sword and no armor.
He clearly is not intending to fight a sword fight
and Goliath just sits there like he's oblivious.
Well the answer is, maybe he could only see this far, right.
So it changes everything when you realize, Wait a minute.
The giant is weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor
and can't see anything.
- [Interviewer] Right.
- He's like.
Like this. Right?
So I do more with that story
but it's all about this,
trying to get people to take a step back
and understand that we can give up
because we have these or feel powerless
because we have these empty definitions
or flawed definitions of advantage.
As a writer, my principle observation
about why other writers fail
is that they are in too much of a hurry.
I don't think you could write a good book in two years.
You may disagree.
You have done that, I think.
But you're an anomaly.
Most of us, can't write books that quickly.
And we need to be a little bit more tortoisy
and a little less harish.
The problem is, the world wants you to be a hare.
Your publisher says I want it now.
You're under pressure to this x, y and z.
You have a one year sabbatical,
where you try to cram in and finish.
You've got teaching load etc, etc, etc.
But in fact, (coughs) even something as simple.
One thing that almost all of the professional writers,
I know, so not people who have a day job,
like yourself, do.
The very best of them do,
is that they write drafts
and then they put the book in a drawer for six months
and they come back to it.
They build in.
They turn themselves into tortoises.
Force themselves to slow down and go back.
Now does that, that in a sense harms the system,
in that that amount of output is lowered
but I don't think the problem
with writing in America right now is a failure of output.
I think it's a failure of quality, right.
So there is a case where I think
the overall system could use maybe a little lower level
of production
and some higher production values.
And I think that having individual writers
who write better books makes us all better.
All my work is about story telling.
But using stories to kind of get at deeper truths.
But fundamentally, I'm a storyteller
and every, you know in Revisionist History
every one of the episodes is a story.
It has a,
and it's not me ranting on about this
or that or the other thing.
It's we meet
really interesting people and we tell their stories
and use that as a way of,
and that's a theme in all of my work.
I think that the, the way into complicated ideas is
through people and their stories.
- Is there anything in your books you don't believe anymore?
Last time I talked to you,
you told me there's some things you don't believe at all.
- Yeah.
- That's bothered me ever since.
- Well here's the question, here's the thing.
There has to be
because you have to keep changing your mind.
And Gus, this is what I said last time
and I believe this even more strongly now.
I mean, we could sit down with the books and go through
and I can say, here's how my thinking has changed
but if you can't do that
about something that you wrote 10 or 15 years ago,
you're not alive.
- Gotcha - Right.
- Right, you have to say.
So absolutely there are things.
- [Woman] We all change our mind.
- Paul Greenburg.
He writes editorials
and this column at the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
It's a conservative paper.
He's a conservative writer.
He probably has the harshest criticism as I've seen.
He says,
(laughs)
- He doesn't sound very happy, does he?
- He doesn't.
I just wondered if,
Do you get a lot of that?
- A long time ago, when I started sort of writing,
being a journalist, I sort of had a,
I had to kind of sit down and think about
how am I going to deal with criticism
because criticism as a writer is absolutely inevitable,
right?
You're always going to have Paul Greenburg's.
There's nothing you can do about them.
And the question is what do you,
how do you want to respond to them?
And I decided very early on
that a) I was never going to make it my,
a sign of my own success
or feeling I had succeeded,
that I silenced critics.
I'm not out to convert the world.
No interest in so doing.
I just simply want people to engage with my ideas
and if they disagree, fine.
The other thing that I decided early on
that I was, I would
I would be happy if the people that I cared about,
people closest to me
thought what I was doing was meaningful.
If my Mom likes it,
if my editor likes it,
if my best friend Bruce likes it, I'm happy.
And that, those are important rules.
And if you could have some version of that,
some kind of system for making sense of criticism,
it's a lot easier to function.
The best way to discover what is special about yourself
is to do it from the outside in.
So I don't think you discovered those qualities
by peering inwards, by focusing on yourself.
I think you discovered them by engaging with others.
The fastest way to discover your own unusual
or exceptional qualities is to hang out with people
who have unusual and exceptional qualities.
I had the good fortune when I was 11 years old
to meet a guy named Terry.
Still to this day, the smartest guy I ever met.
He was, we were in the random little town
in the middle of farming country in Southern Ontario
and Terry was the most fearless and subversive thinker
I have ever met.
I discovered through him that
I can sort of do that too.
I didn't know that at that point.
I was just another, you know,
conventional, compliant, good student
but (mumbles)
and I met this guy whose notion of what it meant
to explore life was to metaphorically blow things up.
You said go left, he went right.
You said this was true, he was like prove it to me.
He was that kind of guy.
The world just kind of opened up when I met him.
I was like Oh my word,
what a way of kind of dealing with ideas
and with experiences.
He was so exciting and so fresh
and I just followed him for years,
just kind of learning from him.
And there was a case where,
that was something I didn't figure that out about
that I liked that kind of way of thinking about the world.
By sitting and introspecting.
I found that out by hanging out with an extraordinary person
You know I've always been interested in,
just people who are unusual in some way.
Unusual good, unusual bad.
Strange, eccentric.
I just find that,
I feel like we learn most from people at the fringes
and that's why you constantly have
to be looking at people on the fringes.
Even if you don't want to be like them,
they're the ones who give you the most powerful lessons.
- People at the fringes?
- Yeah, so,
I do my book outliers for example was about that.
It was about just look at people who are just not ordinary,
who in fact,
who are almost (mumbles) more than extraordinary
and let's sort of figure out what makes them tick.
I began with the story of David and Goliath
and then I told the story about the Indian guy
who coached his daughter's basketball team
because they're both examples
of people without obvious advantages
who
refuse to be passive,
who refuse to take that, the conventional notion
of themselves as underdogs,
as a reason to roll over and play dead
and that's the kind of spirit,
that's the intended to be the kind of message of the book
which is just because you lack
all the things that we conventionally believe
are necessary for success,
doesn't mean you cannot be successful.
I can't pass up an opportunity
to talk about Jamaica and Usain Bolt.
So there's many different explanations
to why Jamaicans completely dominate the world of sprinting.
One explanation though is simply that,
if you look at the history of Jamaican athletics,
they had a series of transcendent runners
in the 60's, 70's and 80's.
When you have that kind of tradition,
what that means is, if you are a seven year old
and you're athletically minded
and you're growing up in Kingston,
you have a model for how it works.
- [Man] Look at, right.
- It's more than a inspiration.
It's like you know that someone
who grew up down the street from you
was capable of running 9.62 in the hundred meters.
It's not just a abstract possibility,
it's a real thing.
You've watched this guy on the track right.
Same thing with, Steph's starts to launching three's
and suddenly everyone is,
you watch (inaudible) now,
they are launching three's from so far downtown
- [Man] It messed up kid's basketball.
Cause that's all they want to do.
They want to shoot three's.
- But it's still,
everyone's like
all of a sudden, it's like woah.
It is possible to routinely make 40 footers.
- At least they're taking the shot.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm happy that you're at least taking the shot.
- Yeah
- Somebody has to inspire you to take the shot.
- Someone has to make it and make it concrete, right.
It's concrete when you see somebody on the street doing it.
You do not want to be cornered by me at a cocktail party.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- It's just the worst.
It's really a bad idea.
I really try to get people to kind of just stay away
cause it's not going to end well.
(audience laughs)
I would be like jabbing you in the stomach.
- Where does that come from?
- This?
- Yes, just that thing of you.
- I don't know, I mean, I, no I'm exaggerating.
I'm actually a very,
nah, I mean I'm largely, actually totally misanthropic.
I don't even like talking to people
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- I
- Your policy and you're quite good at it,
so your second language is working.
- Where does it come from?
I mean, I have.
Listen, I grew up in small town Ontario.
I now live in New York.
I have a massive chip on my shoulder.
The best kind of chip.
A chip is a terrible thing to waste.
You should.
(audience laughs)
You have to kind of
- I heard that you and your buddies at Terry's
said that the best way to be punk rock and to be a rebel
as a kid in Canada at the time was to be conservative.
- Yeah, no, so we,
my mother very artfully had foreclosed
every avenue of rebellion.
There's nothing I can do to possibly rebel
except to become a Reaganite.
Which I briefly did in my,
I had a photograph of Ronald Reagan on my wall
for about three months in college
until I realized, this is the worst idea in the world.
I am essentially making myself into a pariah.
So I took it down.
- Thank you guys so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed.
If you want to get your pick
of who I should profile next in the top tens,
check out the link in the description
and go and cast your vote.
I also want to give a quick shout out
to Tony Bennett from Masteryinmotion.com
Tony, thank you so much
for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word.
I hope you enjoyed the read
and I really appreciate the support, man.
So thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is.
Much love.
I'll see you soon.
- It is our function in the world
is to take things that are complicated
and render them in a form that non-experts foLlow them
and make sense of them.
That's my job.
So it's like, why.
Of course, I
and do I occasionally oversimplify?
Of course I do.
That is my job as well.
Sometimes you have to oversimplify.
If the choice is between keeping an issue in the dark
because most of us can never access it
or maybe oversimplifying it,
reducing some of the nuance
past the point that experts feel comfortable,
I will always choose the latter.
If you could introduce a topic in a form that is digestible,
ten they can start adding back the nuance.
We can have a conversation
and we can start talking about the complexity
but you've got to start the conversation.
My job
the way I see it, is to the start the conversation
and there are some people who
and I would charitably call them snobs,
who are dismissive of any conversation
that doesn't begin with the full level of complexity.
Well that's just not how the world works, you know.