We’ve all heard of pop music, pop culture, Pop Art, and even pop rocks candy. But the coolest pop this season is pop economics. This new genre popularizes concepts of basic economics to explain complex sociological phenomena. Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker columnist and author of The Tipping Point and Blink is king of trend, making this crazy-haired, creative journalist a pop icon.

Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little Brown), employs basic case study analysis to examine the lives and rises of exceptional people, whether brilliant, rich, successful, or otherwise— people who operate at the extreme outer edge of what is statistically possible. Think Bill Gates, the Beatles, Mozart, KIPP Academy students, Korean Pilots, Asian mathletes, and Canadian hockey stars.

Gladwell makes the case that it is not innate talent that leads to success, but, rather the environment and situation surrounding the successful person—his culture, what his parents did for a living, where he grew up, and how he developed their talents. Gladwell argues that successful people are those who have made the most of the series of gifts that have been given to them by their culture, their history, their generation.

I had an opportunity to speak with writer recently in Houston at an event sponsored by The Greater Houston Partnership. Gladwell addressed a sell-out crowd of over a thousand forward-thinking Houstonians, all interested in finding out the secrets to a successful life. JENNIFER ROOSTH

JR: Who would you invite to your ideal dinner party—dead or alive, real or imaginary?

MG: In Outliers, the last chapter is about my grandmother, who I barely knew. She died when I was very young and she lived in another country, so I’d love to invite her. I barely knew any of my grandparents, so I’d start with them. I spend much time in the book talking about how much we get from our ancestors without even realizing it. In the book, I reconstruct my mother’s family going all the way back to the 1700s, and it started with this Irish plantation owner takes as his concubine, this African slave who he purchases, and I’d like to meet her. In the family legend, she is this sort of gorgeous princess. I would fill the table with people from my family. We love royalty.

Is there a dress code for the dinner, or could your great grandmother bring her tiara?

Definitely. Allegedly, she was from the Igbo tribe in Nigeria or maybe from Cameroon. I had my DNA tested and I fi gured out exactly where she would be from.

What do you think of our new President?

When I talk in The Tipping Point about social movements and social power and the kind of power that exists outside traditional political or economic hierarchies—he is exactly that. The basis of his rise to power was putting together this unprecedented grass roots movement. It wasn’t that he had a lot of money. He never had a lot of money, although he was able to raise a lot by the end. And he wasn’t this well known guy, but he is this beautiful example of how social power and finding ways to connect with people on the grassroots level can be as important [as] institutional power. Somebody who starts at the bottom can rise all the way up if they can find ways of skillfully drawing on those kinds of very personal connections and agencies.

There is a chapter in your book that is called “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” in which you explain in the context of the Beatles, Bill Gates, and Mozart and how no one achieves greatness without spending 10,000 hours evolving and developing their talents. When do you feel like you hit your 10,000 point as a writer?

I spent 10 years at the Washington Post. I was the business writer, then the science writer, and then the New York correspondent. That was my 10,000 hours. It was the very beginning of my career in journalism,
and it was from the age of 23 to the age of 33. In the chapter “10,000 Hours,” I talk about the idea of deliberate practice—the idea that it can’t just be that you do something for 10,000 hours, you have to get feedback, it has to be intensive, and you have to be focused on your areas of weakness. All those things were true of my working at that newspaper. You get that kind of feedback but you’re in that kind of rich environment and so, when I started there, I was not a great writer, and when I finished I was.

How you do come up with the ideas that you do and how do you explain to us epidemics in The Tipping Point , intuition in Blink, and success in Outliers. After all your research of others, would you consider yourself a genius?

I don’t think of myself as a kind of genius at all, but I’m a journalist and what journalists are good at doing is understanding where to find answers, understanding where to find people who have very interesting things to say, and who can shed lights on things and then interpreting their work for the rest of us. I’m an interpreter of others’ genius and I’ve become very skilled and practiced at finding the right people to talk about things, and where the interesting nuggets of information [live]. So, I’m much more of a collector, collator, and translator.

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