Malcolm Gladwell is 63. He has written nine books and hosts a podcast. In his telling to the Journal's Marc Myers, though, the career almost didn't start. After college he wanted a job in advertising. He ended up with 25 rejection letters on his wall instead.
The break came through a friend who read the American Spectator. The friend mentioned the magazine had an opening for an assistant managing editor. Gladwell knew nothing about the role and applied anyway. He got it, and in 1984 he moved to the U.S. The Washington Post came in 1987 and the New Yorker in 1996. An essay from that year grew into his first book, The Tipping Point, in 2000.
A quiet house on 2 acres
His parents started out in a small bungalow in Fareham, a town on England's south coast. His father, Graham, taught math at the University of Southampton. His mother, Joyce, went on to work as a psychotherapist. When Malcolm was 5, in 1969, the University of Waterloo offered his father a job. The family moved to Elmira, Ontario, a Mennonite farming town. The new house was about the same size, but it came with 2 acres, home to chickens, geese and bees.
He and his father would walk for two hours without saying a word. His dad wrote five books on subjects like the theory of elasticity. When he helped with math homework, he wrote each problem out on fresh pages in neat handwriting. Gladwell likens it to performance art. He ran track, and by high school that was almost his whole identity. A seventh-grade teacher, Jim DeBock, took a real interest in his writing. At 12 he found the family's one hidden copy of his mother's memoir, Brown Face, Big Master, and read it. He thought she wrote beautifully.
Home now is a stone farmhouse he built in New York's Hudson Valley, where he lives with his two children. He moved in 15 years ago. Back then he and a friend drove around on weekends looking at houses. He calls it “real-estate tourism.” One day they decided to buy. The friend took the house. Gladwell took a piece of the land and built his own. His latest book, The American Way of Killing, is about gun violence. His favorite room at home is a small one his kids call “the cozy room.” It holds his books, a couch and little else.
Our read
This is a Career story with a Behavioral lesson. Twenty-five noes told Gladwell that advertising wasn't his door. The door turned out to be a friend, a magazine and a job he knew nothing about. Many careers turn on an opening like that, and nobody can schedule one. What you can do is stay solvent long enough to walk through it. The farmhouse adds a smaller lesson. Splitting one property between two friends holds up best with a survey, two deeds and a written deal on shared things like the road in.
Here's where it touches your own plan. It's the cash cushion, the money that carries you between paychecks. If a job hunt or a career change is on your horizon, count your cushion this week. Add up how many months of expenses your cash and Treasury bills would cover. Treasury bills are short-term U.S. government debt. Many planners aim for about six months. With that cushion, a stack of rejection letters is a bad month and nothing worse. You buy the umbrella while the sky is still blue. If the count comes up short, bring it to a review and we'll work out how to build it with you.