Digital Diva • Malcolm Gladwell Live

Malcolm Gladwell Live

I went to see Malcolm Gladwell at The Lowry in Manchester last night.

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996 and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.

He is the author of four books, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference,” (2000), “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (2005), and “Outliers: The Story of Success” (2008) all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. His new book is called What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009).

So, Malcolm talked to us about serendipity.

There are three different levels of serendipity:

Columbian Serendipity – Columbus was confused between Italian and Arabic miles and found the country by mistake. He wasn’t looking for it, but he found it.

Archimedean Serendipity – Archimedes got into a bath and solved how to measure non-standard solids. He was trying to solve this problem, but he wasn’t looking to solve it in the bath

Galilean Serendipity – He went out looking for suprises with his telescope – he didn’t know what he was going to find.

Malcolm then went on to tell us a true story of two of his friends working on anti-cancer drugs for a company called Sinta. His friend, Lembo Cheng, bought lots of random chemicals in the Soviet Union and tested them all to see if any worked on cancer cells.

I won’t give a spoiler and tell the whole story in this blog post…it was a story of how Lembo embraced Galilean Serendipity.

He speaks for around 1.25 hours and is calm, considered and passionate about the subject he is talking on. He has that usual style of American self-confidence that can either irritate or soothe. I thought Malcolm was the latter. He’s the type of guy that thinks a lot about the world and who I’d like to sit down with to have a good chat.

He kindly signed my book after his talk and I got a quick photo with him…