Interview with Author of Blink: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for the New Yorker

"Blink," his latest book, is subtitled, "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," which is at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Gladwell is a master at linking sociological and psychological studies with the everyday and mundane, and has an uncanny ability to make connections between new ideas and old, seemingly insolvable problems.

JM: Early on in "Blink," you ask, "When should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them?" That's a great question, and seems at the heart of what happens on the football field. You've got intense, detailed preparation leading up to the game, and lots of fast analysis between plays (by the coaches and players), and then the "instinctive" moves that happen once the ball is snapped. Let's say the Eagles call you up and ask you to spend a day with the team explaining the lessons of "Blink," and how they could be used in the Super Bowl. Would you take them up on the offer? If so, what would you say? Who would you spend the most time with? What would you want to talk about first?

Malcolm Gladwell: I'd tell Andy Reid the story from "Blink" about Millennium Challenge, which was the $500 million war game the Pentagon conducted in 2001. It was an elaborate dress rehearsal for the Iraq War, with one side "playing" the U.S. and another team playing Iraq -- and Iraq won. The chapter is all about how that happened, and it focuses on a retired Marine Corps General named Paul Van Riper, who was playing Saddam Hussein

Van Riper won by speeding up the game. The team playing the U.S. had all kinds of computer programs and decision-making systems, and experts on every conceivable problem. But when the war started, Van Riper hit them with so many unexpected plays so quickly that he forced them out of that kind of conscious, deliberate decision-making mode -- and forced them to rely on their instincts. And they weren't prepared for that. Van Riper, in a sense, went to the "no-huddle" against his much more formidable opponent. And his experience shows that being good at deliberate, conscious decision-making doesn't make you good at instinctive decisions.

That's why I've always been so surprised that more NFL teams don't use the no-huddle. It's not just that it forces your opponent to keep a specific defense on the field. It's that it shifts the game cognitively: it forces coaches and defensive captains to think and react entirely in the instinctive "blink" mode -- and when teams aren't prepared for that kind of fast-paced thinking crazy things happen, like Iraq beating the U.S. Andy Reid has to know that Belichick has an edge when he can calmly and deliberately plot his next move. But does he still have an advantage when he and his players have to make decisions on the spur of the moment? I'd tell Andy Reid to go no-huddle at random, unpredictable points during the game -- to throw Belichick out of his comfort zone.

JM: Well, you've told the story, you've given no-huddle advice, and you've still got 45 minutes on the clock. In walks Donovan McNabb. In walks defensive coordinator Jim Johnson. Reid says if you don't give them some good advice, he's going to put on tights right then and there. So you're going to talk. What do you tell those two?

MG: Oh God. That's putting me in a spot. I guess I would only say that I hope McNabb has stopped watching film at this point. I'm not sure anything he learns consciously at this point about the Pats is going to make much difference on Sunday.

JM: You write about how, in auditions for symphony orchestras, both conscious and unconscious biases are strongly at work, and that the simple placement of a screen -- not being able to see whether the person auditioning was a man or a woman -- made a world of difference. Women, in particular, found themselves getting lots of jobs they otherwise would not have been offered. This reminded me of "Moneyball" arguments. On one side, you've got lots of people who believe that you can tell a whole lot about a player by not looking at him, by looking at selected stats. And on another, you've got the scouts, who believe, in short, that seeing is believing. Both seem to me to be examples of "thin slicing." The numbers guys can look at a stat line and say, "Worth it." The scouts can see a player in action and say, "He's got it." These sides seem to be opposed, but they could also be complementary. How can "Blink" help us understand this, and maybe reconcile the two views?

MG: You are right to bring up "Moneyball," because reading Michael Lewis' book was a real inspiration for me. I think about it this way. What people in the classical music world discovered was that when they couldn't see the person auditioning, they made very different and much better hiring decisions than when they could see the auditioner. With a screen up, for instance, they began to hire women for the first time, which suggests that before that their judgment had been impaired by all kinds of biases they were unaware of. What they saw with their eyes had interfered with what they heard with their ears. Billy Beane makes the same argument about scouting prospects: that sometimes what you see -- whether a player is short or tall, thin or heavy -- corrupts your assessment of what really matters, which is whether a guy can hit. So Beane does, essentially, a version of what orchestras do: he put a screen. He doesn't let what he sees with his eyes corrupt his statistical appreciation of a player's ability.

But this doesn't mean that all instinctive judgments about players are useless, because the question of whether a guy can hit is only one of a number of questions that a scout has to answer. GMs also want to know: is the guy lazy or a hard worker? Is he coachable? Does he have good habits? Will he be a good clubhouse presence? How strong is his competitive desire? What separates Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds from any of the other top players drafted alongside them is not talent, at the end of the day. It's desire and competitiveness -- and to predict that you very much need a seasoned scout who can look at a player and have an instinctive sense of what he'll be like years down the road. I always thought that the critics of "Moneyball" misinterpreted what Lewis was saying. He wasn't saying that all instinctive scouting judgments are flawed. He was saying that there are some questions -- like predicting hitting ability -- that are better answered statistically, and that the task of a successful GM is to understand the difference between what can and can't be answered that way. That's my argument in Blink as well.

JM: The "Warren Harding error," which you devote a chapter to, seems to apply often in sports.

MG: The Warren Harding Error is in honor of our best-looking president ever -- a man so handsome and distinguished and with such a barrel chest and broad shoulders and commanding voice that people would just look at him and be convinced that that he would make a wonderful leader. Unfortunately, Harding turned out to be our stupidest and most incompetent president ever. (And there is some stiff competition for that title). The Warren Harding Error is what happens when our first impressions are so powerful that they cloud our better judgment.
I always think about this when I hear basketball people talking about how high a player can jump. People fall in love with leaping ability, because when you see someone soar so far above the rim its an almost emotional experience. It's like looking at Warren Harding. But, of course, what does leaping ability really tell you about a player? Not much. Most rebounds are taken below the rim, and the key to getting your shot off is really how quick your release is and how you shoot, not how high you jump.

JM: What do you think are the most egregious examples of this, in recent memory?

MG: Who suffers the most from the Warren Harding Error? Well, I'm an embittered New Yorker so I'd say Isiah Thomas. He's brought together a group of marvelous athletes -- Crawford, Thomas, Marbury -- all of whom look the part of basketball players, without being able to actually play the game with any great skill or discipline.

JM: Talk a little about tennis coach Vic Braden, the subject of one of your anecdotes. He says, "We haven't found a single (tennis) player who is consistent in knowing and explaining exactly what he does."

MG: Braden's experience is really interesting. He would ask, say, a world-class tennis player to describe precisely how they would hit a topspin forehand, and they would invariably say that they rolled their wrist at the moment of impact with the ball. And then he'd do a digital analysis of videotape of them actually hitting a topspin forehand and find out that at the moment of impact with the ball their wrist was rock solid. They didn't roll it at all. The expertise of a world-class tennis player, in other words, is instinctive, which means that the knowledge behind their actions is buried in the corners of their brain. They hit a ball unconsciously.

JM: Is that why, quite often, great players don't make such great coaches?

MG: Yes, that's precisely why top athletes so often make bad coaches or general managers. They often don't really know why they were as good as they were. They can't describe it, which means that they can't teach it and they quickly become frustrated at their inability to lift others up to their own level. Mediocre players -- or non-athletes -- tend to make better coaches because their knowledge isn't unconscious. It's the same thing with writing. I know very little about science. But I think I write about science more clearly than many scientists, because I have to go over every step, carefully and deliberately.

JM: Nobody in pro football is known more for studying tape than Peyton Manning. If you were to sit down with Peyton while he's studying film, what would you be most interested in? What would you want to know?

MG: Manning reminds me of Tom Hoving, who I write about in "Blink"; he has spent a lifetime studying and handling and thinking about ancient Greek art. One day, the curator of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles showed him a statute they had just bought for $10 million, and Hoving took one look at it and blurted out: "It's fake." In that first split second, the statue struck him as wrong. And sure enough, Hoving was right. It was a fake. When we spend a lifetime studying something that closely, what we are doing is educating our unconscious. We're developing and training our instincts, so that we can glance at a unusual situation and instantly know what it means. That's what Manning is doing by studying so much film. He's educating his on-field instincts.

What I'd love to do is to put eye-tracking goggles on him. Cognitive psychologists use these a lot: they are special glasses that track exactly what your eyes are focusing on at any given moment -- to an incredible level of detail. When you read the word "moment" in my previous sentence, for instance, did you start at the 't' and work backwards, or zero in on the middle "m" or just look at the first 'm' and then skip to the last 't'? The answer would tell me how you "read" a sentence.

JM: When you used the term "momentary autism," in "Blink," I immediately thought of Brett Favre's pass during the first-round playoff game, when he tossed the ball when he was about four yards past the line of scrimmage. He ran off the field and it appeared he was smiling or laughing, as if he couldn't believe what he'd just done. Was that a moment of momentary autism, do you think?

MG: That's an interesting question. I use "momentary autism" to describe those moments when otherwise normal people become autistic -- that is, like people suffering from that disorder, they lose the ability to mind-read, to make sense of the intentions of others. An autistic person can follow the literal meaning of words, for instance, but cannot interpret gestures. They can understand flirting, in other words, only if one party says to another "I'm flirting with you."

I think all of us become momentarily autistic when we're under extreme physiological stress. For instance, when our heart rate gets above 145, our ability to make sophisticated judgments and to engage in this kind of mind-reading begins to erode very rapidly. I'm guessing Joe Montana's heart rate barely got above 100 in any of his fourth-quarter comebacks. Whenever I see Favre do something inexplicably stupid late in the game -- and I feel like he does that a surprising amount -- I'd love to know what his heart rate is at that moment. Is he just a little too excitable for his own good?

JM: Perhaps momentary autism was the wrong phrase to use in Favre's case, but it does seem like something shut down in his mind when that happened. What can Brett -- or other QBs who need to think on their feet and not panic -- do to keep such things from happening? If Ben Roethlisberger had done that, we'd be calling it a "rookie mistake."

MG: I talked for a long time when I was doing "Blink" with a fascinating guy named Gavin deBecker, who runs one of the top personal security agencies in Los Angeles.
Basically, if you're a movie star or a billionaire or the Sultan of Brunei, he provides you with your bodyguard. DeBecker talked a lot about how rigorously he trains his people. If the quality of our coordination and instinctive reactions breaks down when our heart rate gets above 145, he wants to expose his people to stressful situations over and over and over again until they can face them at 130, 110 or 90.

So he fires bullets at people, and does these utterly terrifying exercises involving angry pit bulls. The first and second and third and fourth time you run through one of deBecker's training sessions you basically lose control of your bowels and take off like a scalded cat. By the fifth time, essential bodily functions start to return. By the 10th time, you can function as a normal human being.

This, by the way, is why police officers will tell you that you must practice dialing 911 at least once a week. Because if you don't, when a burglar is actually in the next room, believe it or not you won't be able to dial 911: you'll forget the number, or you'll have lost so many motor skills under the stress of the moment that your fingers won't be able to pick out the buttons on the phone.

So I'd run quarterbacks who don't do well under pressure through deBecker's gauntlet -- or any other kind of similar exercise so they have a sense of what REAL life-threatening stress feels like. I'd run them through a live-fire exercise at Quantico. I'd have them spend the offseason working with a trauma team in south-central L.A. It is only through repeated exposures to genuine stress that our body learns how to function effectively under that kind of pressure. I think its time we realized that a quarterback needs the same kind of exhaustive preparation for combat that we give bodyguards and soldiers.

JM: You provide some compelling examples of how too much data can undermine decision-making. Can you talk a little about how this might apply to sports? Is there a point, during Super Bowl prep, for example, when the info spigot should be turned off?

MG: Oh, absolutely. I think that the worst thing about the Super Bowl is the two-week layoff. I think teams get over-coached in the second week. In "Blink," I talk about how we can turn ER doctors from terrible decision-makers when it comes to diagnosing chest pain into great decision makers simply by limiting the amount of information they are given about a patient. Load them down with every conceivable piece of data, and they have real difficulty distinguishing patients with heartburn from patients who are experiencing a real heart attack. Limit them to three or four crucial pieces of data, though, and they do a great job. How can that not be true of football players as well? It's quite possible right now that Tom Brady or Donovan McNabb simply know too much about each other.

JM: One of my pet peeves, especially in basketball, is the frequency of timeouts that are called near the end of games. My thought is, "Let 'em play!" It seems that two bad things could be going on when this happens: 1) a loss of spontaneity on the part of the players, and 2) a message sent from coach to players that says, unconsciously, of course, that he doesn't trust that they know what to do. Your thoughts?

MG: I agree, which is why I argued above for the no-huddle. We know the Pats are a beautifully coached team when Belichick has time to think. But are they still the best team in the NFL when Belichick has no time to think, and the players have to rely on their instincts?

Evan Longoria Just Getting Warmed Up

Step into the circle with Evan Longoria. It's an imaginary place he goes to before every pitch, a place where expectations and ramifications and past failures are not allowed, a place where the only thing that matters is the challenge before him. And his challenge right now, in the bottom of the ninth inning at Fenway Park in the Rays' third game of the 2009 season, is to do all he can, with his glove, to finish off the Red Sox. He has already blasted a home run over the Green Monster this afternoon, a two-run shot in the third inning, but his work begins anew every time he steps into the circle.

With a 4-3 lead, one out and American League MVP Dustin Pedroia at the plate, Rays closer Troy Percival gets the sign from catcher Shawn Riggans. At third base, Longoria steps into the circle, a place that demands total focus. His eyes are unblinking, his knees and elbows bent, his weight shifted to the front of his spikes. His mind is embedded in this moment, because this is the only moment he can influence. Percival throws a fastball on the inner half of the plate, and Pedroia scorches it low, toward leftfield. Right into the circle. Longoria's glove flashes open as he reaches to his left; the ball takes one hop, then disappears into the webbing, and he finishes the play with an easy throw to first. Sox manager Terry Francona sees it all from a corner of the dugout and says aloud, "Wow." At field level, it feels as if Longoria had just gloved a Tiger Woods drive 30 yards in front of the tee box.

The quiet SoCal kid exudes an innate confidence, much like Woods does. It's a competitive ruthlessness lurking just beneath the gracious veneer. Longoria is sure he'll figure out a way to kick your ass. "The thing about Evan is that he likes the stardom, he likes all the pressure on him," says Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who shared a college suite with Longoria at Long Beach State. "That's what a superstar has to do, because everybody is looking at you. You've got to want to be special."

And Longoria has always wanted that, even when no major league organization wanted him.

Step into the circle with Evan Longoria, junior college transfer. In his first year at Long Beach State, he slept on a futon in Tulowitzki's suite. The coaches remember him as remarkably quiet, comfortable in his space as Tulo's sidekick. Tulo was the star, the leader, the shortstop, so Longoria became a third baseman. When Ken Ravizza, a sports psychology consultant for the baseball team, first met Longoria, he suspected the teenager didn't see the merits of working on his mental approach, but in time he turned out to be the perfect sponge. "Looking back, if I didn't have the training I had with Ken ... I can see why some guys lose it completely," he says.

Ravizza counsels players to forgive themselves for failure -- and Longoria was far from perfect. In the 2003 draft, 1,480 players were selected; Longoria, then a senior at St. John Bosco High School, in Bellflower, Calif., was not among them. He didn't even get a scholarship offer from a Division I program. He wound up at Rio Hondo Community College, about 12 miles from his house, in Downey. Longoria didn't see that as an obstacle. The summer before classes started, he called coach Mike Salazar two or three times a week: Hey, Coach, you want to go hit? You want to go work out?

Longoria has never known any other way. As kids, he and his three siblings (a younger sister and two younger brothers) each had a sports equipment bag, and when Michael Longoria came home from his job as a school maintenance worker to take them to practices, Evan's bag was already packed. "He always wanted to practice," his dad says. "He was always ready to work." Evan also played water polo in high school, but when he was 15, he told his father, "I want to dedicate myself to baseball." He joined a summer league wood-bat team in nearby Maywood, concentrated on hitting drills and lifted weights to strengthen his skinny frame. Michael couldn't help but notice that his son seemed naturally predisposed to fixing his perceived weaknesses without any prodding. During the 2003 draft, Evan wasn't so much worried about getting picked as he was focused on getting better. "I didn't feel like I would be left out completely," he admits. "You have dreams in high school, and playing in the big leagues is the ultimate dream. But when you don't get any scholarship offers and you have to play at junior college, you start to think you might have to come up with something different in the real world."

When Longoria transferred to Long Beach State, in 2004, he had no presumption of stardom, only the desire to get there. "He knows himself," Ravizza says. "He's not worried about being a success. He's more concerned with the process."

Ravizza taught Longoria how to use structure to find mental relief. Everything is done through the prism of preparing for success: the way you get ready for at-bats, the way you walk to home plate, the way you forgive yourself after making an out or an error. There will be times, Ravizza told him, when you are feeling good and you can just go with it, but on the difficult days, this structure will be there for you. "A lot of times I'd be sitting at home after a game thinking, What the hell just happened?" Longoria says. "My mind would be going so fast." To slow himself down, he performed a relaxation drill he learned from Ravizza. "I would have my focal point," he says. "I'd look out there and let everything go."

Following his first season at Long Beach State, Longoria played in the 2005 Cape Cod League against the nation's best amateurs -- with the wood bats he'd been using for years. He led the league in homers and RBIs and won the MVP award. Now all the scouts wanted him, and in June 2006 he was the third pick in the draft. He reached this point, Michael Longoria believes, because in Evan's daily search for what eluded him, he made himself into a special player. "He doesn't do it for the fame," Michael says. "He does it for the challenge."

Longoria started 2008 at Triple-A Durham and struggled at the plate. Disappointed and frustrated, he punched out a text to Tulowitzki: I am never going to get called up to the big leagues. I'm screwing myself. A week into the season, though, Longoria got called up and went to work. He asked veteran Eric Hinske about his pregame workout routine, and when Hinske told him that he did his weightlifting and physical conditioning early in the afternoon, Longoria started arriving early at Tropicana Field. After plays in the field that felt awkward to him, he asked Foley what he might have done differently. They worked together daily, and at the end of every session, Foley hit 10 balls as hard as he could at the 6'2", 210-pound third baseman. If Longoria bobbled one, he had to make a smoothie for Foley in the clubhouse, and if Longoria fielded all of them cleanly, then Foley made the smoothie.

"Longo, is there anything you're not good at?" Hinske asked. Of course there is. But when Longoria struggles, he leans on structure. Last August he got hit by a pitch, broke his right wrist and was on the disabled list for a month while his teammates tried to hold on in the AL East. Ravizza was watching the Rays on TV and caught a shot of Longoria in the dugout pulling his batting gloves out of his pocket. Later, Ravizza called with a question: "Were you mentally preparing for your at-bats?" Longoria told him yes, that each time his replacement came up, he would put on his gloves and visualize the entire at-bat, pitch by pitch. And when the AB was over, he'd take off the gloves.

Pitchers started executing the scouting report, moving his feet off the plate with inside fastballs before spinning breaking balls low and away. Longoria descended into a postseason abyss and went hitless in his first 17 at-bats in the World Series against the Phillies. Slowly, however, he tunneled his way out. There was no rookie panic, no drowning in the tidal wave of the postseason.

Last summer, Salazar bumped into him after a game in Anaheim, at a time when the rookie was rocketing hits all over the place. The coach, who had prodded Longoria in his juco days, wasn't surprised. "You are raking," Salazar said.

Longoria broke into a huge grin. "I am raking," he answered. And then he stepped back into the circle.