Malcolm Gladwell Essay
Have you ever thought about the way people make decisions?
How behaviors spread like viruses? The reason why random individuals
become so successful? Malcolm Gladwell has, and he has shown why
these little things are so extremely important. Born in Great Britain on
September 3, 1963, Malcolm Gladwell was born to his parents, Joyce and
Graham Gladwell. His mother is a Jamaican-born psychotherapist and a
part-time writer, and Malcolm’s father, Graham, is a civil engineer
professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Malcolm
grew up in Elmira, Ontario, Canada after his family moved to Canada
when he was at a young age. After high school, Malcolm graduated from
Toronto’s Trinity College with a degree in history. He then started his
writing career at the Conservative Monthly, a monthly magazine. For a
decade he wrote for the Washington Post, and he now works for the New
Yorker, a magazine based out of New York. He lectures at colleges across
the nation and spreads the word of the three books he has written. As a
writer, reporter, and social scientist, Malcolm Gladwell has shown
through his many forms of writing, that the little aspects of life we do
not notice are maybe the most important ones.
Fresh out of high school, Malcolm Gladwell was just a young man
without much of a clue about what he was going to do with his life. He
was accepted into the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, after he
received a basic education in his hometown of Elmira, Ontario, Canada.
He graduated from the university in 1984 with a Bachelor’s Degree in
history, but Mr. Gladwell was not going to be a historian. Influenced
much by his mother’s writings and her published book, Brown Face, Big
Master, he decided he was going to be a writer (Rose). He began his
career at the American Spectator, a conservative, monthly magazine
(Zengerie). But from 1987 to 1996, he was a science writer and New
York bureau chief, for The New Yorker, a New York-based
political/cultural magazine. Currently, Mr. Gladwell is a staff writer at
the New Yorker, and he has published three books since 2000 (Donadio).
Even though Mr. Gladwell has only written three books, he has
been writing since the late 1980’s. Those books include: Tipping Point
(2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008). He has written in the New
Yorker for a while now, but he has not produced anything as lengthy or
popular as his books (Anderson). His books are all non-fiction, and they
mainly deal with many topics of social sciences. His books are all based
on his research of those social sciences, and he makes implications and
conclusions about social sciences through his research (Rose). Through
his career, Mr. Gladwell has become quite popular as he was named to
TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year in 2005 after
his publication of his second novel, Blink (Gladwell). Earlier in 1999,
Gladwell’s profile of inventor Ron Popeil in the New Yorker won a
National Magazine Award (Gladwell). In 2007, Gladwell received the
American Sociological Award for excellence in the “Reporting of Social
Issues.” Also in 2007, Gladwell received an honorary “Doctor of Letters”
degree from the University of Waterloo, a public university in the city of
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (Davis and O’Reilly).
Throughout, the years Malcolm Gladwell has not written
controversial articles or books, but his works have been quite influential
(Rose). In his books, he has shown unusual facts in the realm of social
sciences, and he has flashed a light on the little things that most people
do not notice or think about in their everyday lives. Describing the
three rules of epidemics in his first novel, Tipping Point, or explaining
how humans think without thinking in Blink, and proving his theory of
the reason why we have successful people in Outliers, Mr. Gladwell has
shown all of us some interesting topics in the area of social sciences. Mr.
Gladwell has also lectured around the country at universities or in
public places on social sciences and has shown all of his witnesses that
there is something to his observations and writings. Also, his curiosity
in these topics helped him become one of the most influential writers of
our time.
Thirty to forty years from now, Malcolm Gladwell will be done
writing books, and he will have retired from his jobs writing articles in
newspapers and magazines. He will probably have had his run at being
famous and will not be remembered as a prominent figure in writing.
His value as a writer nearly diminished, and his influence forgotten, it
will be a terrible shame. But, if readers abroad can read his books and
listen to his lectures, he will become more well known, and he will live
on as a remembered author whose works will be read in schools
nationwide. His works are of great quality and his lectures spread the
true words of his ideas. So, really, he should be better known and
everyone should be reading his works and listening to what he has to
say. Most people do not know about these small things that Malcolm
Gladwell has explained and described, but if everyone did, we would
have a more knowledgeable community that knows how these “little
things” make a “big difference.”
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