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Malcolm Gladwell with Dawson Church

Desirable Difficulties

Dawson: Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times best-‐sellers, including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and his latest, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. He is on Time magazine’s list of the most influential people and is one of Foreign Policy’s top global thinkers.

In The Tipping Point, he explored how ideas spread. In Blink, he explored decision-‐making, and in Outliers, he explored the roots of success.

With his newest book, David and Goliath, he examines our understanding of the advantages of disadvantages, arguing that we have underestimated the value of adversity and overestimated the value of privilege.

For you and me, writing a New York Times best-‐seller would be the achievement of a lifetime, so how does Malcolm Gladwell do it time after time? How does he sustain peak performance in his creative output? In this interview, we’ll explore what it takes to operate at peak creativity day after day.

Malcolm, welcome to the Peak Performance Symposium. Let’s start by reflecting on some of the lessons and ideas from your most recent book, David and Goliath. We’ll also talk later about how you sustained that creativity in article after article, book after book.

In David and Goliath, you begin with the classic story of how David wins the battle against the enormous giant, Goliath, even though, at first glance, Goliath has much more power. Give us a quick overview of the paradoxes of power you explore in this book.

Malcolm: The first paradox is a misunderstanding based on our historical distance from that story. In ancient times, the sling that David chose to use against Goliath was considered one of the most devastating weapons available. Armies used whole fleets of slingers, particularly against infantry. I talked to one ballistics expert who calculated that the rock leaving David’s sling would have stopping power equal to a .38 caliber handgun, so it was not a child’s toy he had. In fact, it was greater technology than what Goliath had. By changing the rules and bringing this sling to what was supposed to be a sword fight, David did what insurgents or underdogs typically do, which is violate convention.

The second paradox is that Goliath was not who he seemed to be. There’s fascinating speculation among endocrinologists about whether Goliath had a condition called acromegaly, which is a tumor on the pituitary gland that causes overproduction of human growth hormone. That would explain his size.

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People who are that much taller than their peers often do have acromegaly, but the side effect of acromegaly is often restriction of vision. There are tons of clues in the bible story that Goliath can’t see. Why is he led onto the valley floor by an attendant? Why does he keep yelling to David, “Come to me. Come to me”?

When you add those together, you realize that a guy with superior technology changed the rules and advanced on a giant who couldn’t see him so the giant didn’t know what was happening. That’s not a story of a once-‐in-‐a-‐lifetime, one-‐in-‐a-‐million upset victory. That’s a battle that looks a lot more like one in which, from the outset, David had an equal, if not a greater chance of winning.

Dawson: You look at that story initially, and then you look at a whole bunch of other stories. What fascinates me, Malcolm, is that you’re the guy who sees the clue that what we think is the lesson isn’t really the lesson, and that much more is going on than first appears to be the case. How do those clues first click in your brain as being important?

Malcolm: It’s all fueled by simple curiosity. I love nothing more than rooting around in a library or calling up experts on the phone about obscure things or going to see them. I know from experience that even if you think you’re not going to get anything interesting, you probably will. The great lesson I learned as a journalist for years at the Washington Post was if you look underneath the surface, you will always find stuff you didn’t know was there.

In this case of the David and Goliath story, I thought, “I think I know what the story is about, but I should really go and root around and read what people who studied the story have to say about it.”

Of course, the literature on that story is a hilarious free-‐for-‐all among ballistics experts, endocrinologists, neurologists, experts in ancient warfare, and biblical scholars. You realize that this is really fun. That’s when you start to figure out that you can say something new.

Dawson: It takes an expert eye to separate the wheat from the chaff, and then to make a coherent narrative out of that huge collection of material. You do that in this book in all kinds of ways. It’s remarkable how you apply this to many different domains of society, civilization, and psychology and draw common conclusions from very disparate sources.

One of the things you talk about near the start of the book is how we assume that more is better—more wealth, more education, more power, and so on. You say it’s a paradox. More can be better, but there’s often a point at which it stops being better. That whole foundational idea of our society that more is better is one you really challenge.

Malcolm: It’s what your mother always told you, right? Everything in moderation. I sought to explore this notion. One of the mistakes that people in positions of authority make or that Goliaths make is that they assume that the advantage they have in material wealth or resources will consistently give them a leg up on their opponent.

I challenge this by looking at a couple of examples where having more is only useful up to a point, and then it can actually hurt you. A classic example is class size. If a class is really large and you spend a lot more money to make it smaller, the kids in the class will do better. There is no question about that.

You can’t keep making classes smaller and expect that effect to keep going. At a certain point, a class can become too small and the outcomes of the children in that classroom will then start to become worse, not better.


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We think when classes get too far below 20 kids, the same thing that used to make for a better educational environment goes into reverse. You don’t have enough kids to have good discussions. You have so few kids that one child who is particularly disruptive can dominate. When you’re struggling as a student, what you really need in order to feel like you’re part of the discussion is someone who is struggling alongside you, asking the same questions and having the same problems. If the class gets too small, the chances of you having a real peer get really small as well.

I could go on. In other words, you cannot keep spending money in perpetuity on education and expect things to keep improving. After a while, your wealth or the things you can buy with your wealth starts to backfire.

I think this is true in a lot of cases. If a company gets too large, does its size start to undermine its creativity and nimbleness? Yes, absolutely. Everyone at GM will tell you that GM got too big.

I’m sure that everyone at Microsoft right now thinks that Microsoft is too big. This is a phenomenon that I think we can find over and over again in society. It’s totally common sense, yet it is a rule that is routinely violated.

Dawson: That’s right. Look at companies like Apple, which as they grow really struggle to maintain that sense of innovation, freshness, and newness. Some of them do succeed much further along the growth path than others, but others succumb to that sclerotic disease much sooner. Others manage to keep innovation alive, or at least recognize the importance of keeping it alive. This is counter to our usual thinking, which is that more is better and that that will keep on going.

You also introduce the whole concept of the Bell curve and where that line starts to diminish and dip. Give us some other examples of the Bell curve and how it plays out in different parts of society.

Malcolm: The technical term that scientists love to use is the inverted U-‐shaped curve. I talk a lot about this with respect to parenting. If you have no money, being an effective and good parent is hard. You’re under an incredible amount of stress and you don’t have a chance to give your child access to certain kinds of opportunities. As I give you more money, being a good parent gets easier, but that relationship doesn’t go on forever. If a parent starts to get too much money, the job of parenting gets harder again. You can’t pinpoint with perfect accuracy what that turning point is.

I had a fascinating discussion with a guy who is a psychiatrist who works with the children of wealthy families. He talked at length about this. If you have $50 million and your child asks you for a pony and you think it’s a bad idea, you have to be able to articulate that. You can’t say, “You can’t have a pony,” because obviously you can afford it. You have to say, “I won’t get you a pony. I have chosen not to, even though I could.” That requires you to articulate to your child all of the reasons why getting everything he wants is not a good idea.

If you are a middle-‐class family and your kid asks you for a pony and a pony is a bad idea, you don’t have to come up with any reasons at all. All you do is shrug and say, “I can’t afford it.”

When I was growing up, I could have asked for a Ferrari and my father would have just laughed in my face. If my father was Warren Buffett and I asked for a Ferrari, he would actually have to tell me why I can’t get a Ferrari. That’s not impossible, but it’s hard. You have to have skills as a parent when you’re rich that you don’t have to have when you’re middle class.


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In the book, I have a long discussion with a very wealthy guy about this problem. As they acquire wealth, few people think about this and recognize how the task of raising fulfilled, disciplined, hard-‐working kids is going to grow more difficult once they get past a certain income.

Dawson: An example I heard recently was from a psychologist who works with a Native American tribe. High school dropout rates are a big problem in the tribe. Education is a top priority. So the tribe began giving kids who graduate $100,000 for finishing high school. Is that necessarily a good thing?

There are paradoxes here. I’ve watched kids getting cars when they finished high school and have looked at kids who had enormous privilege. It definitely seemed to have an effect on their later self-‐efficacy.

I had one chilling experience in New York, in your end of the world, when I was in graduate school. I met this guy who was a trust-‐fund baby. I thought, “Wow! This guy lives in this building. He’s a trust-‐fund baby. He’s had no need to work his whole life. What an enviable position.”

He had a dog. He would take his dog out every day for a walk. The dog obviously meant a lot to him. As we began to talk about his life and the dog, he said, “Dawson, what you don’t understand is I do take the dog out for a walk every day and I do feed the dog. This is the only important thing I’ve done my entire life. Everything else has been handed to me. This is the only significant thing I’ve done for the world, myself, the dog, or anyone my entire life.”

That was a sobering experience for me. It made me realize that those things we think of as being a great advantage are not necessarily a great advantage.

Talk about the idea that strategies that work so well for people, like wealth acquisition, have their limits. Military power, wealth, or whatever it might be that is such a good thing in the initial doses might become counterproductive in larger ones.

Malcolm: In my book, I have a fascinating conversation with a very successful guy in Hollywood. He came from a middle to lower-‐middle-‐class family. In the first hour of our interview, he talked about his childhood. His family did not have much, so he was forced from a very young age to learn the meaning of work and money and to make a connection between the two and to see how by sacrificing, being disciplined, and showing initiative, a person could earn money and, in so doing, feel fulfilled. He learned that he could feel like he was contributing to the world, making a difference, and feel like he had a purpose. Those lessons were crucial in his career. In his career, he ended up amassing hundreds of millions of dollars.

He said, “Every one of those crucial lessons is now denied my own children.” He used to shovel snow for all of his neighbors starting at the age of 8 or 9, a standard thing that countless kids across America did when they were that age. His kids never had to shovel snow.

That sounds like a trivial thing, but it’s not. I feel like the kinds of principles that underlie how we achieve satisfaction and fulfillment in the world are laid down very early. To be able at the age of 8, 9, 10, or whatever to make a connection between your own effort and a reward is one of the single greatest gifts you can get from your childhood.

Dawson: In getting the reward without the effort, you never cement that circuit in your brain.


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Malcolm: You never do. We were in his extraordinary mansion in Los Angeles. I realized that it was a kind of prison for his kids. It denied them all kinds of experiences that people with much less money get for free.

Dawson: I’m fascinated by Warren Buffett because he’s often regarded as the most successful investor in America. He is lampooned sometimes by hedge fund managers and mutual fund managers because he lives in the same house in Omaha, Nebraska, that he has had his whole married life. Whereas other executives of far lesser means would have their own private jets, for many years he flew coach class wherever he traveled. He did eventually succumb. He said that it was a smart move to get his own jet.

He is manipulating all of this wealth, yet he doesn’t have the need to turn it into ostentatious display. You get the impression that he’s doing it for the fun of it, as well as for the leverage it gives him.

Malcolm: Part of what explains his ability to be so extraordinarily productive and successful late in his life, I think, is that he has made a deliberate attempt to keep those kinds of psychological conditions in play.

Dawson: As you grow in wealth or security, you actually may then have to exert yourself and deliberately and consciously plan how to maintain the kind of psychology that allows you to be in touch with the satisfaction that those gifts bring.

Malcolm: I think that’s very true. You can see this on every level. Just as there are perils when countries and companies get too big and powerful, there are also real psychological perils to individuals and families that achieve great wealth. I think one of the things that has set someone like Buffett apart is that he had an intuitive understanding of that from the beginning.

Dawson: In terms of countries, one of the biggest comeuppances recently in foreign policy for the U.S. has been the Iraq war, which graphically showed us the limits of power and the difficulty of combating a determined insurgency. You talk about this as well. We might think that when very strong countries fight very weak countries, the strong country always prevails. According to the research you cite, actually about one-‐third of the time, the weaker country prevails. If the weaker country uses unconventional methods, it prevails two-‐thirds of the time. That’s counterintuitive because you would think the country with the most tanks, guns, armaments, money, power, resources, and so on will win. Go ahead and talk about that whole point about why these unconventional tactics seem to turbocharge the ability of the underdog to prevail.

Malcolm: When we look at any kind of contest between two parties, I think our intuitive sense of where advantage lies is often wrong. If you look at the history of wars between countries that differ in size by at least 10 times, so very big countries and very small countries, what you discover is what you just said. In those apparently lopsided contests, if the smaller country fights essentially a guerilla war, they will win the majority of the time. In other words, what matters in combat is not material resources. What matters are psychological factors, how you choose to fight, how long you’re willing to fight, and what kind of sacrifices you’re willing to bear.

That’s a hard lesson for us to grasp. If the United States chooses to fight Vietnam, Iraq, or any number of other apparently very small countries, there is no reason going in to presume that the United States is a favorite. That’s what history should tell us. If the United States were to invade Canada tomorrow, there is no reason to presume, based on the historical record, that America is the likely winner in that conflict. I say that as a Canadian.


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That’s weird. It is one of the things I grapple with in this book. We have all this evidence in our lives of how what we think of as an advantage is often not an advantage, but yet we seem to ignore it. We don’t take it seriously.

Dawson: That’s right. We make a zero-‐sum calculation of the advantages of each side and operate on that assumption in so many areas in our lives, when, in fact, that assumption is wrong. Then we keep on making this mistake over and over again. It’s astonishing.

Malcolm: In this book, I examine that question and walk around it. I don’t fundamentally get to the bottom of it. I don’t think anybody can. What is it about? Why is our view of the world at its root so out of kilter?

Dawson: It’s misinformed, and it stays misinformed. Despite the evidence we have to the contrary, we keep on making the same calculation over and over again. We keep looking at which athlete has the biggest muscles and the fastest response time. We miss those subtleties again and again. It’s quite an astonishing phenomenon that that’s the way our brains seem to work.

Malcolm: I think that’s true.

Dawson: One fascinating further step you take this concept is you coin the term “desirable difficulties” to describe the concept that our disadvantages could actually be advantages. When I first read that, I thought, “Why would you wish some of these difficulties on yourself or your kids?” It turns out that overcoming difficulties can actually help us.

Talk about those desirable difficulties and how they can paradoxically be put to our advantage.

Malcolm: This is a phrase that was conceived by two brilliant psychologists at UCLA called the Bjorks. They’ve talked about this in learning theory. Sometimes when I make things easier for you when you’re learning something, I improve your ability to learn, but sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes the best way to improve your ability to learn something is to make the act of learning harder. That’s called a desirable difficulty.

Sometimes when I raise the bar a little bit, it forces you to concentrate more, to be more disciplined, to focus, to go over things in your mind, and to pause before jumping to conclusions. Those are all ultimately good things.

I ask the question about whether there are handicaps in the world that can be understood to be desirable. I look at dyslexia and at this fascinating fact that some fraction of dyslexics go on to have extraordinarily successful lives.

If you ask them why, they will tell you it is because of their handicap, and not in spite of it. In other words, their dyslexia was a desirable difficulty, not an undesirable one. To me, that is a really interesting notion.

Dawson: Tell us one of the stories you tell in your book about this.

Malcolm: I tell the story of the great trial lawyer David Boies who is perhaps America’s best trial lawyer and also profoundly dyslexic and has difficulty reading. I was puzzled because he’s a lawyer and he reads maybe one book a year.

I asked him, “How did you get your law degree or even succeed as a lawyer?” He said, “It’s because of what my dyslexia taught me. First of all, it taught me how to listen and it also taught me how to develop


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my memory.” The way he got through school was by sitting, listening, and committing to memory everything the teachers said because he couldn’t read the textbook.

Those two skills allowed him to scrape through school and law school, but when he’s in the courtroom, they are the two biggest advantages in the world. What is being a trial lawyer? It is really listening to every nuance, committing to memory what everyone who testifies says, being able to engage them in real time, and confronting them when they say things that aren’t true or that require elaboration. He looks at his extraordinary skills as a trial lawyer and says, “I know where that comes from, and two of the most crucial skills I have are things I developed only because I was robbed of the ability to read.”

I found versions of the story over and over again with entrepreneurs, Hollywood producers, Wall Street traders, and more. It was fascinating.

Dawson: That would lead us to a whole different attitude and view of our own deficits in life. Rather than complaining about them and wishing we didn’t have them, we can give thanks for them. We can find a way of turning them to our advantage or at least accepting ourselves the way we are.

Carl Rogers, the great family therapist, said that the paradox of human growth is that it begins with accepting yourself exactly the way you are. When you accept yourself the way you are, you then begin to grow. However you are and whatever you are, accept your seeming deficits. They may be forcing you to develop other abilities that, were it not for those deficits, you might never be pursuing.

Malcolm: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Dawson: Give us another example of a desirable difficulty that actually spurs and triggers evolution and growth.

Malcolm: When I look at the fascinating and complicated question of parental loss, there have been studies of very successful people or groups such as British prime ministers or American presidents. When you look at these people who have achieved that extraordinary position as a group, you find that people who have reached that level are far more likely than the general population to have lost a parent in childhood.

That’s weird, because losing a parent in childhood is just about the most devastating thing that can happen to someone. All kinds of bad outcomes are associated with losing a parent. There’s a much higher rate of depression, dropping out of school, mental illness, or you name it. Nothing good normally comes with that.

Yet, when we look at these people who have been extraordinarily successful, we find the same thing. What that suggests is that there are a small number of people for whom parental loss is a desirable difficulty.

The experience of having to work through that extraordinary tragedy at a very young age in some small percentage of cases so strengthens, emboldens, and empowers people that they have a big advantage when they go out into the real world. They learn what they’re capable of. They become hardened to adversity. They are required to grow up much faster. There are all kinds of things that happen that end up being extraordinarily advantageous.

That does not mean they are happier. In fact, as a group these people may be profoundly unhappy. In fact, there was famous study of English prime ministers that basically concluded that, as a group, they


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are just about the unhappiest people you’ll ever find. Regarding desirable difficulties, we’re not talking about happiness. We’re talking about career success, which is an important distinction.

It’s like Nietzsche said, “Anything that does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Dawson: There’s a concept in coaching called self-‐efficacy. That is the belief that you have the power to make change, shift, set goals, and attain them. The absence of one parent might well trigger the development of self-‐efficacy much sooner than having the support of both parents for your whole childhood.

Malcolm: The really fascinating question is what predicts why some people react to parental loss in that positive way and what predicts those who don’t? That’s another one of these questions that I think we can only guess at.

Dawson: Yes, and of course there’s that whole phenomenon that two people when confronted with the same experience, whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral, may respond very differently. One might grow and transform through it. It can destroy another person.

My own field of study is posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. One of the intriguing questions we’ve been looking at for the last decade is why, when you expose people to combat, do some come back with PTSD? About a quarter of them come back with clinical PTSD but three-‐quarters of them don’t come back with clinical PTSD, having had the same experiences.

We’re just starting to explore on the frontier of psychology a concept called posttraumatic growth. There are some people who undergo traumatic experiences, but they go on to have profound personal positive change as a result of the same experiences that destroy other people.

That’s the paradox. Why do some experiences have such a corrosive effect on people and yet on other people those same experiences will not have that effect, and, in fact, might even lead to great attainment. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Malcolm: Isn’t that interesting? I wish you’d had this conversation with me when I was writing my book because that’s exactly the kind of variation and heterogeneity I’m interested in. I talk about how Londoners reacted to the Blitz. Everyone predicted before the war that if the Germans bombed London, the overwhelming majority of Londoners would panic and flee to the countryside and the war would be over. That did not happen. Why didn’t it happen? It’s because not everyone had the same response to being bombed.

Some people found it utterly traumatic, were terrified, and never recovered. Others got stronger. Others emerged unscathed and went around thinking that no one could kill them. It sounds flip to put it that way, but that’s exactly what happened. It’s the same thing you’re describing.

Two people can experience exactly the same event and have profoundly different responses to it. If the great challenge of 20th century medicine was to describe the fundamental human processes, I think the great challenge of the 21st century psychology of medicine is to describe the variation in human responses to things. That’s what we’re getting at here.

Two soldiers can come out of combat. One is floored by the experience and the other is emboldened by it. How is that possible? It’s a fantastic question.

Dawson: It also does really bear both on medicine and psychology. It’s not just psychological. There was a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that if


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teenage boys have higher levels of salivary cortisol, it predicts depression. They’re 14 times more likely to be depressed as adults. There’s a strong correlation not only between psychological factors such as depression, but also physiological factors such as cortisol. High cortisol correlates with increased chances of risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and all kinds of negative physiological consequences later in life. If you lower your cortisol, then all of those things are better.

We’re realizing more and more that there’s physiology in psychology, and if you can get a handle on these kinds of psychological issues when you go through these challenging experiences, it will have a beneficial effect on your physiology and your medical outcomes later in life.

What I’m curious about is that you are looking at the same set of facts and the same pieces of information that everyone else sees. This sort of information is publically available. When I was growing up, I read about the troubles in Northern Ireland. I read all the same information and yet I never made the connections that you make, such as why increased military action in Northern Ireland produced exactly the opposite of the intended effect.

When you tell the story in the book, I think, “Oh, now I see it,” but what I’m asking isn’t so much about the fact but about your mental process. How do you come to look at the same information everyone else is staring at yet come to often counterintuitive and very different conclusions about what’s driving that?

Malcolm: I don’t know. I guess I trained as a journalist and that’s what journalists are supposed to do. Unless we can tell our audience something new, we don’t serve any function, so that’s part of it.

Part of it as well is that I’m an outsider to many of the fields I write about, and there’s an incredible advantage to being an outsider. I don’t know what the conventional wisdom is, so I’m not beholden to it.

If I write something that may seem particularly novel in its perspective, half of the time I don’t even realize it’s novel because I’m just someone who has walked into something, looked around, perceived it a certain way, and written about it. Only later might I learn that it may seem like an unusual perspective. It’s a lot easier to be unusual when you’re from the outside, when you have an outsider’s perspective.

Dawson: Every field has its established wisdom or its established paradigm, and when you’re outside of that paradigm, you often can see things that people within the paradigm can’t see.

I’m curious, though. When you have a hot new idea, what does it feel like? Do you know you’re on to something when you receive some information or have a thought or an idea, and does some part of your being just light up? Do you say, “Aha, I’m on the trail to something big here!”?

Malcolm: Usually, it takes a long time. I’m really interested in peer effects and the idea that your peers can influence you in any number of ways. The assumptions we have about peer effects, particularly in education, are faulty. Most parents will say, “I want my kid to be around the smartest possible group of peers,” but behind that is an assumption that says the smarter your peers, the smarter you are, when, in fact, that’s not the way the world works at all.

Intuitively, I know that sometimes the most effective peers I had were the ones who were involved with the behavior that I wasn’t interested in at all. It was from my peers who were using drugs that I got the idea that I never wanted to use drugs. Negative peer experiences can be even more powerful than positive ones.


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I go into this in the book. It’s not necessarily a good idea to be surrounded by really smart people. Sometimes it’s far more effective for your self-‐efficacy for you to be the smartest person in the room, which is a very different idea about what kind of peer responses you want.

I’m interested in this at the moment. Will it lead anywhere? Maybe not. In all likelihood, probably not, but for the next couple of weeks I’m going to read about this and turn it over in my mind. Maybe there’s a way to come up with something. Maybe I’ll just put it aside.

That’s what I do all of the time. I have an idea in my head, and I read and think about it and talk to people about it. Sometimes something develops and sometimes something doesn’t.

Dawson: One thing about peer effects that strikes me is that in PTSD research we’ve been mulling over the results of one study that will be published soon. It was a group of mostly Vietnam veterans and their spouses. They went through a series of seven-‐day retreats. When they went in, about 80% of them had clinical PTSD. When we followed them up six weeks after the retreats, only 28% of the veterans had PTSD. Going in, about a third of the spouses had PTSD because living with a Vietnam veteran for 40 years produced PTSD in the spouse, but only about 4% of the spouses had PTSD afterward.

We were absolutely astonished by this result because, in all of our other research, we saw PTSD reduce and then level off if we were successful at treating it, but it didn’t usually get better. This was the first study showing that these people not only recovered during the retreat, but in the six weeks after the retreat they kept on getting better.

We were running around like crazy, asking, “Why is this happening?” The only good answer we’ve found is the peer effect. Psychologically wounded people supporting each other and sharing with each other seemed to be reinforcing the healing process.

It wasn’t being with the healthy people that helped them. It was seeing other wounded veterans recover, and the spouses interacting with each other and with other spouses and other veterans.

I think we’re on to something here. We’re speculating as a result of this research that peer effects may be extraordinarily powerful in reinforcing positive psychological change.

Malcolm: That’s so interesting. My intuition would have been totally different, which would have been that the single most important thing for someone suffering from PTSD is to hang out with people who are “normal” so he can relearn the norms. My intuitive peer notion would have led you in exactly the wrong direction, and I wonder how often we do that.

Dawson: That’s the thing about research. We put these questions to the research test. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is totally wrong. Other times it’s right, but sometimes it’s full of surprises. Until you’ve done the research, you don’t really know which way the coin will flip.

Following the rabbit through the rabbit hole is so interesting because you then find fact after fact. Some of them conform to your preconceived notions and others challenge them. I think that’s what makes for a fascinating, creative project.

I’m curious to know, besides this peer effect project, what are you working on currently?

Malcolm: I just finished a piece for the New Yorker. Do you remember the Waco fire, the Branch Dravidians, and David Koresh?

Dawson: Yes.


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Malcolm: I just did a piece about that. It was all about the FBI’s failure in negotiating with the Branch Dravidians and the fact that they could not conceive that the Branch Dravidians might be sincere in their beliefs. It was a fascinating insight about the inability of many of us or all of us to value the sincerity of those who have chosen to distance themselves from the mainstream. With that kind of extremism, we always try to denigrate it or to look on it as cynical or self-‐serving. It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around the fact that someone may believe some crazy, strange, or eccentric thing and be genuine in their belief. It’s a fascinating little case study in the difficulty the majority has sometimes.

Dawson: Yes, it’s because those extreme beliefs seem so hard to square with the world as it is. I meet people of faith sometimes and they believe things that I just simply couldn’t believe myself, yet I have to respect the fact that they well and truly believe them, even though my mind has difficulty reconciling their beliefs with the evidence of reason. It’s easy to discount the strength of those beliefs. If you do, it’s to your peril. When governments discount them, like in Northern Ireland, and fail to see the value of connection, community, and shared experience, the results can be tragic.

Malcolm: I write about that in my book because I think it is a powerful case study in so many lessons for those in power about the ways their power can mislead them.

Dawson: Then you weave it in with things like the Three Strikes Law about high school basketball. I was intrigued by the way you weave many different storylines together and show the common threads between them all.

I would love to close by having you talk about what advice you would give us about sparking our own creativity. You’re not only writing books, but you have some leisure time and some time to reflect. You’re also writing deadline-‐driven pieces for the New Yorker and you have to produce a stream of creative output day after day, week after week.

I don’t think your well is in any great danger of running dry, but what would you tell people who want to find those kinds of wellsprings of creativity in themselves? What do you do to spark that? What can you do to nourish that in yourself and induce that kind of creative output?

Malcolm: One is to understand that the amount of deliberate activity doesn’t necessarily lay the groundwork for creativity. You have to go out of your way to expose yourself to things that challenge your worldview. It doesn’t happen by accident.

The crucial thing is that as well as that notion of challenging your worldview, you have to be willing to put what you think you know up for scrutiny. I have done a U-‐turn. If you read all of my books, you will find that I say things in this book that are directly contrary to things I said in previous books. To my mind, that is a good thing. It’s a sign that I’m still intellectually alive. That’s part of it.

The other thing is that the time factor is crucial. I don’t think that creativity happens quickly, at least in my case it doesn’t. I have to find ways to give myself opportunities for rumination and reflection. The scarcest commodity in the world we live in now is time, particularly quiet time. Finding and carving out space for quiet time is crucial.

Dawson: How do you do that personally?

Malcolm: It’s about planning your day and making sure there are big chunks. When I work out, I work out. When I go for a run, I don’t ever take an iPod. There’s nothing in my ears. There are big chunks of every day when I’m by myself. I try every day to have lunch by myself so I can sit and just think, muse,


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and let my mind wander. I don’t think you can lead a creative life unless you build in those kinds of moments.

Dawson: Do you feel pressure to produce?

Malcolm: No, because it’s fun. I don’t think anything that is enjoyable has pressure. To me pressure is only associated with things that you don’t want to do. For many of us our lives are so full, and carving out that time to be still and reflect is difficult. Letting your mind just wander and think, “What if?” is something we don’t often give ourselves.

Our lives are so full of predigested opinions. If you look at a newspaper feed, you’ll find the headline news stories and then you’ll find all kinds of ways to think about it supplied to you in pieces below, so for people to have original thoughts is actually quite hard given the bombardment they have of predigested opinions.

I think it’s a good reminder to think of the whole idea of giving yourself free space and time to let ideas mature in your thinking.

Dawson: Malcolm, this has been a fascinating glimpse into your personal process. Thank you so much.

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