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Where I Get My Ideas...
by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. His recent article on paper made everyone whose desk is covered in a well-organized chaos of papers feel much, much better about themselves. Gladwell was born in 1963 in England, and grew up in Canada. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto in 1984. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter for The Washington Post, first as a science writer and then as New York City bureau chief. Gladwell's first book, The Tipping Point, came out in 2000.

The most common question I get from readers is: Where do you get your ideas? And the answer I always give is "I don't know." I don't mean to be flippant. It's just that the question seems to presuppose that there is a place where I find ideas -- a system -- and there isn't. It's perfectly idiosyncratic.

In The Tipping Point, I wrote a chapter on "Sesame Street" because I once at some business dinner sat next to a guy who, 30 years ago, did research for "Sesame Street" as part of his master's thesis in psychology. I had no idea that people did research on "Sesame Street" -- and the idea seemed so promising that I spent the next two weeks immersed in the world of children's television research. Another time I was quite literally flipping through back issues of the American Journal of Sociology (this is, I realize, a highly embarrassing confession, but for those who may worry about me, let me say that I do, in fact, have a life), and ran across an article on the epidemic nature of ghettos. Voila! That idea -- that epidemic theory could be used to describe social phenomena -- was the basis of my book, The Tipping Point.

Another time, I wanted to write about shampoo (I can't, actually, remember why) and realized, halfway through, that what I really needed to write about was hair color. The result was one of my favorite stories ever. The process of generating ideas, for me, is entirely unpredictable and serendipitous.

The other important piece to the puzzle is that having an idea for a story is actually overrated. The idea is actually the easy part. The execution is the hard part. This is a hard idea to accept, sometimes, because we live in a culture that is obsessed with the moment of inspiration, with the conceptualization of an idea, and somehow we tend to underrate the importance of the kind of hard slogging that it takes to bring a good idea into reality.

Recently, for example, I had a wonderful idea. I wanted to write about diapers, and how -- paradoxically -- the diaper is one of the most technologically complex products on the market. (Trust me: making a diaper is 1,000 times harder than making a computer.) But I didn't take the time to properly report it. I didn't come up with compelling, supporting insights and details. I didn't manage to bring the idea to life, and so the article was a disappointment.

So I guess there are two answers to the question -- where do you get your ideas? The first is, I don't know. The second is, it probably doesn't much matter.

The Tipping Point

Further Reading:

• Sara Nickerson's take on that question
• Jerome Charyn - A New Yorker plays ping-pong
• Kat Meads - on organizing a bookshelf
• Gunnar Swanson - how to make books

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