While I recognize his strength as an agent provocateur, one particularly skilled at providing a clever turn of phrase, I have to admit that I find it challenging as a practitioner to make use of his insights. Gladwell’s observations can be a challenge to operationalize. Take, for example, the idea of practicing patience while waiting for creative fruit to bear . As he himself responds during the Q & A session, one ideally wants to end up with a portfolio: be it of talent, rock bands, start-up companies, stock investments, etc. combining near-, mid- and long term projects and payoffs. In reality however, I believe we mostly hope for near term projects and payoffs and grudgingly accept the outcome that some will inevitably bleed into mid- and long-term payoffs. However, we rarely overtly set out to embrace long-term payoffs because of the difficulty in being able to differentiate long term hopefuls from long term failures. That differentiation is key and I feel no closer to knowing how to do it better post viewing this Gladwell video than I was before.

For more on your call for patience “And good things – some of which may take a long, long time to develop – are worth waiting for.”, see Samuelson, Judith and Preisser, Claire, A Critical Mass For the Long Term, in “Breakthrough Ideas for 2006,” Harvard Business Review, February 2006, pg. 62.