What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

“We want to know what it feels like to be a doctor, because we’re quite sure that it doesn’t feel at all like what it means to sit at a computer all day long, or teach school, or sell cars. Such questions are not dumb or obvious. Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to the writing you now hold in your hands.”

This manifesto serves as a thesis statement about Gladwell’s own artistic process. He maintains that the curiosity about how people’s minds work as they go about their day-to-day business is not idle but an essential part of the human condition and, by extension, of the creativity exhibited in the formation of this book of essays. His emphasis on wanting to know what being a doctor feels like indicates our innate capacity for empathy.

“In the best of these pieces, what we think isn’t the issue. Instead, I’m more interested in describing what people who think about homelessness or ketchup or financial scandals think about homelessness or ketchup or financial scandals.”

Gladwell’s demotion of the personal judgment in favor of the perspectives of experts reveals a humility in his approach. He will be the eternal student rather than the authority. This searching attitude is reflected in his writing; he repeats a list of subjects in which he is not an expert, thereby revealing the extent of his curious mind and his willingness to start from the beginning.

“The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting.”

In a conversational tone, Gladwell tells his readers that the secret to finding stories is to believe that everyone and everything has one. He then swaps the word “trick,” with its connotations of “magic,” for “challenge,” because thinking in this way is counterintuitive and requires driving against the inherent bias toward finding most topics boring and irrelevant.