I also related strongly to the leukemia doctor story. I think my rough up bringing made me more stubborn and tenacious than my peers because if I didn’t work I didn’t eat.
I read the Tipping Point in particular more than once, I thought it was so fascinating
I’m kinda sad now
Do not make policy decisions based on Gladwell :-)
Edit : a perhaps stretched analogy - his stories are to me akin to Taylor Swift sharing her story and saying "I practised hard and didn't give up and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams". It's true but not as meaningful or applicable as it may seem - it's insufficient causation and incomplete correlation.
Majority of people who practice hard won't be Taylor Swift.
Conversely,There are many additional reasons beyond practicing hard Taylor Swift succeeded.
It's a compelling narrative but horrible statistical model or understanding of world and causality.
Real science is boring, wishy-washy and full of caveats, as they should be, researchers should disclose limitations of the studies. But because of that, it's not something the average person will find memorable or talk to a friend about.
Gladwell's popularity comes from the fact that his narratives are told with conviction and in a way that feels exciting. People respond to that, similarly to how they respond to confidence in interpersonal interactions.
This implies he considers himself a storyteller but he does not. I recently heard him interviewed where he (rightly or wrongly) explicitly described his job as being a researcher.
eg: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-pop-history-bombs-a...
> An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
There's probably a deeper philosophical point to make here between "ART" and "SCIENCE" broadly (and reductively) considered, but I see it as a matter of respect: Do you think the author respects the subject enough to write a factual story that portrays that subject honestly, or is the author doing a cleaned-up piece of tabloid journalism and going for readership and responses, and is simply going to use some misunderstood parts of that subject as props to make a Sweeping Conclusion regardless of what the facts support?
In short: Does the author care about facts, or do they care about making their case?
What story is that?
At the time Emil was (as I recall) treated as an outsider and viewed with skepticism for his work until basically it was irrational not to see how he was saving lives
[0]: https://uofuhealth.utah.edu/innovation/news/2014/07/malcolm-...