I think three things were instrumental in his inevitable path to The Tipping Point: And he’d only just begun writing for The New Yorker when he got his “big break.” Gladwell doesn’t have a post-graduate journalism degree from Columbia. How did he reach a place in his writing life when a powerful literary agent picked him as her next development project? From the rich stew of journalists that publish their work every month, or week or even every day in all of the “A-list” periodicals across the country and even around the world? How did he find himself in this predicament? He had to deliver a 1.5 million dollar book…a BIG BOOK that would be a two-page spread, front of the catalog big deal, with every one of his publisher’s marketing bells and whistles attached to guarantee its bestsellerdom. He didn’t just have to deliver a manuscript that would be edited and copyedited and proofread and dumped into a publisher’s catalog on page 37 next to another writer’s midlist business book. Perhaps the difference between Gladwell and us, in just about all cases, is that he’d worked his ass off for twelve years hitting story deadlines time and time again as a magazine and newspaper journalist to hone his craft.īut it was the constraints-those rare positive seven figure ones, the most difficult to overcome-Gladwell had to toil under that could have driven him crazy.

While the intangible things he had no control over must have terrified him, I’m confident that the one thing he didn’t fear was the work. Malcolm Gladwell, back in 1998, faced the same writing dilemma we do today–having “easy” access to the nuts and bolts of book publishing, but struggling with whether we’re good enough to make use of the opportunity.Īs he sat down to the pile of rough “Tipping Point” book materials on his desk that would be fodder for his first draft, he feared criticism, failure, indifference…all that stuff. Download the Math of Storytelling Infographic

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