Malcolm Gladwell: prediction

Transcript context

…Correct, since the ’80s. Since the ’80s. Like most people, I was surprised, but I sort of bought the Kool-Aid, the thought we were in this great age of new business formation. And the thing about that that’s so worrying is, I would imagine, that an awful lot of what it takes for someone to start a new business is some direct knowledge of someone else who started a new business. In the same way that it’s very hard to get people to want to go to college if they don’t have someone in their life who has gone to college, or to understand the importance of it unless they have some personal connection. So when you see a trend line that’s going down in something like that, I wonder whether it will accelerate over time — the less businesses that get started, the less businesses get started because there’s no one with any kind of connection. You have to have some glimpse of this as a potential possibility. And that would result, I think, in a lot of business talent being squandered. I will say parenthetically, I’m someone who is self-employed. Before I was self-employed, I worked for large organizations. And if you would ask me when I worked for the Washington Post, say, would I ever want to be self-employed? I would have reacted with horror. I would have thought, “I can’t understand how you could do that. Don’t you wake up every morning in a cold sweat [not] knowing where your next dollar is coming from?” It turns out, I’m way happier self-employed than I was working for . . . but getting there took 20 years, it took all kinds of lucky breaks. There was no one in my life who . . . I didn’t know any self-employed people. I didn’t know how to make that jump, and I wonder how many people are in a similar position of not realizing they have the ability to do something entrepreneurial and would be happier doing something entrepreneurial but just have no example. Hi. Thanks for being here. Something that surprised me about what you just said earlier in the conversation was that you feel you’re a very risk-averse person. Can you expand on that?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.