How to sell good ideas
The night before I met Malcolm Gladwell, I went to see him speak at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The gig was sold out: as the young and diverse crowd filtered in, and the Specials played over the PA, I reflected on how unusual it is for a writer to fill so many seats...
粘贴几个片段， 文章有点长， 但是， 我保证， 不会浪费你一分钟时间，
很多宝贵的想法， 会帮助你在论坛建立更多的友谊， 挣更多的家园币
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Raising a mixed-race family in England was not easy: in her 1969 memoir, Brown Face, Big Master, Joyce Gladwell recalls a boy shouting “nigger” at her as he rode by on his bike. When Graham Gladwell, by then a professor of mathematics, was offered a position at the University of Waterloo, in 1969, the family moved to a small town in southern Ontario, where Malcolm enjoyed a blissful childhood, untroubled by racism. He has written about feeling neither fully white nor black: “In a room full of people I do not know, I always search out the ones who fall into the middle, like me, out of some irrational idea that we belong together.”
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This is exactly what happened with the author David Epstein. His first book, The Sports Gene (2013), includes a close critique of Gladwell’s “10,000-hour rule”, which states successful athletes or musicians have usually practised for an average of 20 hours a week for ten years. Gladwell responded to Epstein in the pages of the New Yorker. “It was up to him to set the tone of our disagreement, as the more prominent figure,” Epstein told me. “He could have tried to eviscerate me. But I realised that what he wanted was this playful back and forth.”
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Both are Canadians of a similar age (Gladwell 56, Peterson 57) and Peterson teaches at Gladwell’s alma mater, the University of Toronto. I ask Gladwell what he thinks of him. “He’s unbelievably interesting. He’s not someone you need to agree with in order to value.” What people misunderstand about Peterson, he says, is that in Canada, raging against liberal norms makes you a contrarian. In America, it just makes you a Republican.
While Peterson tells the world how to live – and you’re either with him or against him – Gladwell is essentially happy for you to live however you want. And while Peterson is certain about everything and responds with truculence to criticism, Gladwell is OK with being wrong and would like more people to consider that they might be, too. To use Christopher Hitchens’s distinction, Peterson is a literalist, Gladwell an ironist. No wonder Peterson is in the ascendant.