Malcolm Gladwell: Daily Routine

He calls his life “astonishingly boring,” but it’s built around slow mornings, deep thinking, and writing in public.

For someone who has written some of the most interesting books I’ve read in recent memory — Outliers (2008), Talking to Strangers (2019) to name a few – Malcolm Gladwell confesses to “lead an astonishingly boring life,” one made up with long stretches of reading and writing.

For every hour I spend writing, I spend three hours thinking about writing.

Gladwell’s daily routine starts between 8-8.30am. He’ll have some tea or coffee, and a very small meal — half a cup of oatmeal, or as revealed on his conversation with Tim Ferriss, a third of a croissant, “I think one should eat the absolute minimum in the morning. I don’t think you should eat a lot in the morning. That’s one of my rules.”