Author Malcolm Gladwell on his top career tips and how he got started

Author Malcolm Gladwell has written six popular books, including “Talking to Strangers”, “David and Goliath”, “Outliers”, “Blink” and “The Tipping Point”. He was a writer for The New Yorker for many years and is now the host of the Revisionist History podcast. During our conversation, Gladwell explored the themes of his new book, “The Bomber Mafia”.

Even if you never decided to become a writer, what prompted you to pursue this career path?

I am not always the path of least resistance, but that of the most fun. I kind of tripped over the writing. I just found it to be incredibly pleasant and effortless, and found that I couldn’t wait to wake up every morning to go to work. And so I thought, “Well, why would I ever have done anything else then? I solved the problem.”

Why were you so captivated by the history of the Bomber Mafia and what prompted you to write a book on this subject?

I went to Tokyo a year and a half ago and came across this little museum dedicated to the US Air Force firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. I was so moved, upset and blown away that I wanted to tell the story. story behind that night in March 1945, when the US Air Force essentially burned much of Tokyo to the ground. One hundred thousand people died.

So I started digging into history and told a little piece of the story in my podcast, Revisionist History. But when I was done I realized I hadn’t even scratched the surface and there was a much richer story to tell. And that’s how I ended up deciding to write the book.

In 2013, when I interviewed you for your book “David and Goliath”, you said, “You learn more from hard times than from good times.” How has the failure of the bomber mafia been a lasting contribution to society, even if it led to mass deaths?

The Bomber Mafia was a group of aviators in the 1930s stationed at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. They were trying to reform warfare, and they believed that wars could be fought entirely from the air. They also believed that you should be able to drop bombs with such precision that you could bring an enemy to their knees – without killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, without destroying cities, without having expensive land battles, and without doing anything. Of this genre. of extraordinary carnage that we saw in WWI.

So they had this dream. The dream didn’t work during WWII, but in the 60 or 70 years that followed, we got a lot closer to what the bomber mafia was talking about. We haven’t had wars as deadly as WWI and WWII. We engaged in limited military conflicts, where we were able to target whoever we wanted to strike.

Now, I am not saying that this resolves all the moral questions surrounding the military escapades of the United States over the past 60 or 70 years. However, the bomber mafia said there should be a way to pursue military objectives without killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. And we are certainly much closer to it today than in WWII.

One of the themes you explore in the book is the collision between morality and technology. What lessons can we learn from the way the Bomber Mafia approached the technology and the principles it stood for?

The reason I love the Bomber Mafia so much is that they were a bunch of engineers and pilots. They were the kind of people who would work in Silicon Valley today. So they had a strong belief in technology, but at the same time, they had a very solid moral foundation. They believed that technology should be used in accordance with ethical principles and they took their ethical obligations as seriously as they took their technological fascinations.

It’s rare. I can’t find anyone in Silicon Valley who has the same nuanced approach to technology, who really seriously asks the question, “Is this technology going to be used in ways that advance human well-being?” That was the only reason the Bomber Mafia pursued this dream of a new kind of warfare. It wasn’t because they thought it was cool or that they were going to make the money, it was because they thought it would save lives. That’s the lesson from the book – that we need these types of people in these positions.

What’s your best career advice?

That’s a tip I borrowed from my friend, and he says, “Always have a plan.” And what he means is, don’t let your job 100% dictate what you do. Always have something that you pursue for your own reasons, that satisfies you in a different way, that you are the boss, and that you have control over.

If your job doesn’t allow it, you need to do something sideways. You are often a better judge of the best and most productive use of your time than your supervisor.