Burton Malkiel (author of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street"), the guy who popularized index investing, doesn't condemn individual stock picking. He is fine with it, and he does it himself, provided you have a pool of safer investments in index funds to back you up in case you fail. Which is basically what I'm recommending.
Malkiel says that picking a few stocks is fine as long as the core of your portfolio is indexed. The majority of your exposure to equities is in a single stock, and it's an extremely-hyped tech stock.
He begins by decrying the stock pickers, and then goes on to endorse ARM. Ahem?