December 28, 2010
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Crush
My crush on Malcolm Gladwell began with “Outliers,” reached an apex with “The Tipping Point,” but continues lazily on with “What the Dog Saw.” I mean, normally, I don’t even read prefaces. Do you read prefaces? Who reads prefaces. After I had marked and underlined quite a bit of the preface to “What the Dog Saw,” I knew…he was a good one.
“ The trick is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instincts as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We fliter and rank and judge. We have to. There’s just so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day. Shampoo doesn’t seem interesting? Well, dang it, it must be, and if it isn’t, I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me to something that is.”
“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you’ll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not the place you’d really like to be. I’ve called these pieces adventures, because that is what they are intended to be. Enjoy yourself.”
Then in the book: “How do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers—not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.”
I didn’t get to finish reading the book. It was due at the library. booooo.
