700 Inspirational Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2023)
1. “David fought Goliath not with inferior but (on the contrary) with superior weaponry; and his greatness consisted not in his being willing to go out into battle against someone far stronger than he was. But in his knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger.”
2. “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” — Malcolm Gladwell
3. “Just to summarize: I lurched into Rachel’s room like a zombie, freaking her out, then went for a fist pound. It is impossible to be less smooth than Greg S. Gaines.”
4. “Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head.”
5. “The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.”
6. “To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.”
7. “We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.”
8. “It's challenging, it's not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.”
9. “Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
10. “Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people “senders.”
11. “There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.”
12. “Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment. This”
13. “the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.”
14. “Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action."(p.115)”
15. “LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.”
16. “Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions, by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.” Malcolm Gladwell
17. “If you knew my father, you would have seen him in other stressful situations, and you would have come to understand that the “frightened” face, for whatever reason, was simply not part of his repertoire. In crisis, he turned deadly calm. But if you didn’t know him, what would you have thought? Would you have concluded that he was cold? Unfeeling? When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea—a stereotype—for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often.”
18. “What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?”
19. “Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them.”
20. “The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.”
21. “Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.”
22. “In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree — and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.”
23. “Everything that can be tested must be tested,”
24. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.” – Malcolm Gladwell
25. “LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.” – Malcolm Gladwell
26. “Do we as a society need people who went through trauma?”
27. “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.” — Malcolm Gladwell
28. “How you feel about your abilities – your academic ‘self-concept’- in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
29. “If you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.”
30. “The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.”
31. “Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.” ― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
32. “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning”
33. “Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people-Salesmen-with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.”
34. “What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality?”
35. “African-Americans have spent a few hundred years learning how to cope with being outgunned and overmatched.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
36. “(Basketball coach Rick) Pitino has achieved extraordinary things with a fraction of the talent of his competitors.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
37. “We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our bets interest.”
38. “If people disobey, don’t ask what is wrong with them, ask what’s wrong with their leaders.”
39. “Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.”
40. I think when one’s working, one works between absolute confidence and absolute doubt, and I got a huge dollop of each. – What The Dog Saw
41. “There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources - and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.”
42. “All that mattered to Curtis LeMay was the final outcome.”
43. “The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930's was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.”
44. “Western communication has what linguists call a "transmitter orientation"--that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. ...within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.”
45. “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”
46. “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” Malcolm Gladwell
47. “Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.” – Malcolm Gladwell
48. “I have a new way of doing things, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.”
49. “What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a "unified" trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.”
50. “Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky--but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.”
51. “The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.”
52. “What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.”
53. “Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it’s fallible. It’s not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the “truth” of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled. Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments.”
54. “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”
55. “An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
56. “Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. What’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.” – Malcolm Gladwell
57. “Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.”
58. “We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
59. “Proficimus more irretenti: ‘We make progress unhindered by custom.'”
60. “Tripping twice on the same stone.”
61. “Don't look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.”
62. “I feel I change my mind all the time. And I sort of feel that's your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.”
63. “We have, in short, somehow become convinced that we need to tackle the whole problem, all at once. But the truth is that we don’t. We only need to find the stickiness Tipping Points,”
64. “Working really hard is what successful people do…” — Malcolm Gladwell
65. “The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
66. “The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.” Malcolm Gladwell
67. “The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.”
68. “We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.”
69. “the 10,000hr rule is a definite key in success”
70. “capitalization learning”: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.”
71. “Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.”
72. “So what does correlate with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate-at every variety of monkey and ape-the larger their neocortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.”
73. “If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.” — Malcolm Gladwell
74. “Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.” — Malcolm Gladwell
75. We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for. – Blink
76. “A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.”
77. You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world. – What The Dog Saw
78. “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.”
79. “What are we seeing here? One very real possibility is that these are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting styles that we talked about in the Chris Langan chapter. Think back to Alex Williams, the nine-year-old whom Annette Lareau studied.”
80. “The principle elements of a puzzle all require the application of energy and persistence, which are the virtues of youth. Mysteries demand experience and insight.”
81. “So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and when there are rules in place that assure you that tomorrow you won’t be treated radically different from how you are treated today. Legitimacy is based on fairness, voice and predictability, and the U.S. government, as much as Americans like to grumble about it, does a pretty good job of meeting all three standards. Pg. 293”
82. “Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.”
83. “We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is - and the definition isn’t right. [...] It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.”
84. “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.” Malcolm Gladwell
85. “Outlier are those who have been given opportunities – -and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
86. “Whenever we have something that we are good at–something we care about–that experience and passion fundamentally changes the nature of our first impressions.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
87. “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”
88. “In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”
89. “In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more—which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less.”
90. “All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can’t look away one time and scream at him another. You can’t treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn’t hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.”
91. “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” ― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
92. “Underdogs win all the time. Why, then, are we shocked every time a David beats a Goliath? Why do we automatically assume that someone who is smaller or poorer or less skilled is necessarily at a disadvantage?”
93. “Achievement is talent plus preparation”-Malcolm Gladwell. , ‘Outliers.’
94. “A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
95. “Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth.”
96. “Courage is not something that you already have…Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
97. “Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally”. – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
98. “If you’re in business it’s both a promise and a warning. It says that sometimes little things can cause some little guy to have an overnight success.”
99. “To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.”
100. “When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
101. “When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave. This is called the “principle”
102. “Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because the act of facing overwhelming odds, produces greatness and beauty.”
103. “Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference. It means if you want to know whether-and what-kids are learning from a TV show, all you have to do is to notice what they are watching. And if you want to know what kids aren't learning, all you have to do is notice what they aren't watching. Preschoolers are so sophisticated in their viewing behavior that you can determine the stickiness of children's programming by simple observation.”
104. “To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.”
105. “I mean, it’s ridiculous,” Dhuey says. “It’s outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them.”
106. “general intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.”
107. “We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes.”
108. “The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
109. “When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.”
110. “We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.” — Malcolm Gladwell
111. “being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience”
112. “There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.”
113. “We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”
114. “Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.”
115. “If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.”
116. “The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.”
117. “…If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.” – Malcolm Gladwell
118. “You can take pretty much any sentence in this book and if you read it enough times, you will probably end up committing a homicide.”
119. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
120. “The real me isn’t the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
121. “David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.”
122. “At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.”
123. “Working really hard is what successful people do...”
124. “The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.”
125. “He was maxed out. He had no
126. “We need a better guide to facing giants—and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah.”
127. “Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder”
128. “‘I’d rather have somebody who is real stupid but did something – even if it’s wrong he did something – than have somebody who’d vacillate and do nothing.’ That’s what LeMay values.”
129. “The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.” Malcolm Gladwell
130. “My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person—Jacob—who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life.”
131. “The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
132. “There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.”
133. “Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.”
134. “Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because the act of facing overwhelming odds, produces greatness and beauty.” Malcolm Gladwell
135. “It is not the brightest who succeed. … Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those that have been given an opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
136. “They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.”
137. “Cultural legacies matter, and once we've seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it's hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first century intellectual tasks.”
138. “Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills”
139. “Success is the result of what sociologists like to call accumulative advantage.”-Malcolm Gladwell. , ‘Outliers.’
140. “our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. the internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency.”
141. “Mimicry, they argue, is also one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response—even a microsmile that takes no more than several milliseconds—it’s not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you.”
142. “So the rich kids aren’t the alpha group of the school. The next most likely demographic would be the church kids: They’re plentiful, and they are definitely interested in school domination.”
143. “Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States.”
144. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Malcolm Gladwell
145. “One thing I’ve learned about people is that the easiest way to get them to like you is to shut up and let them do the talking.”
146. “I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.”
147. “We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight”
148. “Capitalization Learning” – we get good at something by building on the strengths we are naturally given…”Compensation Learning” – what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than learning that comes easily.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
149. “Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.”
150. “Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture.”
151. “Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth.” – Malcolm Gladwell
152. “Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
153. “The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
154. “Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment.”
155. “Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.”
156. “Maybe when a woman shows up in a courtroom wearing a niqab, the correct response isn't to dismiss her case—it's to require that everyone wear a veil”
157. “As human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.” — Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
158. “Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
159. “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.” – Malcolm Gladwell
160. “..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.”
161. “Without persistence, principles are meaningless. Because one day your dream may come true. And if you cannot keep that dream alive in the interim, then who are you?”
162. “Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. We can prevent the people fighting wars or staffing emergency rooms or policing the streets from making mistakes.”
163. “We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
164. “I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing…. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” — Malcolm Gladwell
165. “It is not the brightest who succeed. ... Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those that have been given an opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
166. “... they were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.”
167. “The sign of a great fighter in the ring is, Can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning.” – British government film from 1940
168. “The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart.”
169. “Obsessives lead us astray sometimes. Can’t see the bigger picture. Serve not just the world’s but also their own narrow issues. But I don’t think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.”
170. “Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
171. “Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way. I think that approach is a mistake, and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgements. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that — sometimes — we’re better off that way.”
172. “In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
173. “We have, in short, somehow become convinced that we need to tackle the whole problem, all at once. But the truth is that we don’t. We only need to find the sticky Tipping Points.” — Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
174. “If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented”; and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date.”
175. “These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles—these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize—are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”
176. “Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.”
177. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.” — Malcolm Gladwell
178. “Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking—It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead!—is useless,” Harris concludes. “This is adult propaganda; these are adult arguments. It is because adults don’t approve of smoking—because there is something dangerous and disreputable about it—that teenagers want to do it.”
179. “[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.”
180. “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.” Malcolm Gladwell
181. “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”
182. “The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up.”
183. “He’d had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses —ever makes it alone.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
184. “Mediocre people find their way into positions of authority.”
185. “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”
186. “If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?”
187. “Truly succesful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”
188. “As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
189. “I'm drawn again and again to obsessives. I like them. I like the idea that someone could push away all the concerns and details that make up everyday life and just zero in on one thing - the thing that fits the contours of his or her imagination. Obsessives lead us astray sometimes. Can't see the bigger picture. Serve not just the world's but also their own narrow interests. But I don't think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.”
190. “The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
191. “Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine.”
192. “We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.” Malcolm Gladwell
193. “concerted cultivation. He gets taken to museums and gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp, where he takes classes. When he’s bored at home, there are plenty of books to read, and his parents see it as their responsibility to keep him actively engaged in the world around him. It’s not hard to see how Alex would get better at reading and math over the summer.”
194. The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I 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. – What The Dog Saw
195. “If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.”
196. “Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”
197. “the futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it.”
198. “Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.”
199. “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”
200. “We have seen," Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, "that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”
201. “I deal with writer’s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent—and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise.”
202. “Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn’t happen.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
203. “To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.” — Malcolm Gladwell
204. “If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. "The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.”
205. “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”
206. “Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.”
207. “The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”
208. “When and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were make a significant difference in how well you do in the world.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
209. “For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger role preparation seems to play.” ― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
210. Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good. – Outliers
211. “Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major,” they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don’t.”
212. “Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade...It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you're really like to be.”
213. “Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside.”
214. “It’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment…People are ruined by challenged economic times. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
215. “Spontaneity isn’t random.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
216. “The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.”
217. “But (we) have to produce results, and I had to produce them. If I didn’t produce them, or made a wrong guess, get another commander in there. That’s what happened to (General Haywood) Hansell. He got no results. You had to have them.” – General LeMay
218. “Somewhere in retirement, Haywood Hansell saw that announcement in the newspaper, and I’m sure he wondered why he didn’t get an award as well for the effort he put toward fighting a war with as few civilian casualties as possible. But we don’t give prizes to people who fail at their given tasks, no matter how noble their intentions, do we? To the victor go the spoils.”
219. “Harvard es sobre todo una corporación pretenciosa, que funciona con el incentivo del beneficio. Eso es lo que la hace rodar. Tiene una dotación de miles de millones de dólares. La gente que la dirige no necesariamente busca la verdad y el conocimiento. Quieren ser peces gordos; y cuando uno acepta un pago de esta gente, al final todo se reduce a contraponer lo que uno quiere hacer, porque siente que es lo correcto, frente a lo que te dicen que has de hacer para recibir el siguiente pago. Cuando estás allí, tienes que pasar por el aro; de eso se encargan ellos.”
220. “Emotion is contagious.” – Malcolm Gladwell
221. “No one – not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses – ever makes it alone.”
222. “A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
223. “a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups. Who”
224. “The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.”
225. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” – Malcolm Gladwell
226. We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we really don't have an explanation for. — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
227. “Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions … by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.”
228. “We have come to confuse information with understanding.”
229. “There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
230. “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.”
231. “Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.”
232. “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”
233. “this is the assumption of transparency in action. We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t.”
234. “extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress.”
235. “But in the end it comes down to a matter of respect, and the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice, and the most corsive tone of voice that a doctor can assume is a dominant tone. ”
236. “When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning?”
237. “To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.” Malcolm Gladwell
238. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I’ve failed. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
239. “We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
240. “The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context.”
241. “[Greenberg] knew that cultural legacies matter--that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn't assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their heritage that did not suit the aviation world, they could change.”
242. “When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire, and trust. The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen.”
243. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”-Malcolm Gladwell. , ‘Outliers.’
244. “That's like being a hockey player born on January I.”
245. “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.” – Malcolm Gladwell
246. “How good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.”
247. “the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point,”
248. “Testers for 7-Up consistently found consumers would report more lemon flavor in their product if they added 15% more yellow coloring TO THE PACKAGE.”
249. “In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.” – Malcolm Gladwell
250. “The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”
251. “The "culture of honor" hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.”
252. “There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. [...] The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters”
253. “Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.”
254. “Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.”— Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
255. “the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over the course of the Computer Center’s life, thousands of students passed”
256. “We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.”
257. “I think overall it’s a disadvantage,” Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator.”
258. “We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school - except, perhaps, those at the very top of the class - are going to face the burden that they would not face in a less competitive atmosphere.”
259. “Learning how to deal with the possibility of failure is really good preparation for a career in the business world.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
260. “What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn’t a fundamental trait, or what they called a “unified” trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.”
261. “To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten years? Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.”
262. “but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
263. “The world we could have is so much richer than the world we have settled for.” — Malcolm Gladwell
264. “We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.”
265. “We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we really don’t have an explanation for.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
266. “Character isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.” Malcolm Gladwell
267. “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success...with a society that provides opportunities for all.”
268. “When a problem solver is finally free to act, he will let nothing stand in his way.”
269. “77% of Americans think that it makes more sense to use taxpayer money to lower class sizes than to raise teachers’ salaries.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
270. “You can’t concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What’s gonna happen if it doesn’t go right?”
271. “as it may be—matters. How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.”
272. “They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten.” Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.”
273. “The three rules of the Tipping Point—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context—offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.”
274. “We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.”
275. Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that’s nonsense. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
276. “My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
277. “Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free.”
278. “the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice,”
279. “We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to. Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose.”
280. “Power can come in other forms as well – in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
281. “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
282. “Emotion is contagious.”
283. “We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.”
284. “Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
285. “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.” Malcolm Gladwell
286. “But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.”
287. “The sad thing about doping is how much it obscures our appreciation of greatness.”
288. “Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
289. “The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
290. “Transactive Memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds.”
291. “Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.”
292. “We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that-sometimes-we’re better off that way.”
293. I don’t go to an office, so I write at home. I like to write in the morning, if possible; that’s when my mind is freshest. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
294. “when you remove time," de becker says, "you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction”
295. “Practical intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.”-Malcolm Gladwell. , ‘Outliers.’
296. “Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.”
297. “I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don’t affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart.”
298. “That’s the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
299. “The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.”
300. “People are in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotions overrides irritability.”
301. “innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, “agreeableness,” they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks—to do things that others might disapprove of.”
302. “A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.”
303. “We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
304. “The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”— Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
305. “They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn’t starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn’t have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings.”
306. “That’s not because journalists know more about Japan. It’s because they knew less: they had the ability to sort through what they knew and find a pattern.”
307. “It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,” Seán MacStiofáin, the provisional IRA’s first chief of staff, said once, looking back on those early years.”
308. “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.” – Malcolm Gladwell
309. “We do ability grouping early on in childhood...if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability.”
310. “To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.”
311. “Sometimes “Proof” is just another word for letting people suffer.”
312. “An extraordinary high number of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
313. “The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To”
314. It is really about talking to people, having people tell you things. That will always be the most efficient and useful way of finding out new and interesting things. You have to expose yourself to as many interesting people as you can. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
315. “Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.”
316. “Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.”
317. “Working really hard is what successful people do.”-Malcolm Gladwell. , ‘Outliers.’
318. “We form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally – by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
319. “The more you invest in a set of beliefs – the greater the sacrifice you make in service of that conviction – the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.”
320. “Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because the act of facing overwhelming odds, produces greatness and beauty.” — Malcolm Gladwell
321. “Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation." It’s an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own.
322. “Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation”
323. “Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.”
324. “our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. but with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret - and decode - what lies behind our snap judgment and first impressions.”
325. “Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction”. – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
326. “IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savvy is knowledge. It's a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.”
327. “A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”
328. “that “television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movement of the television viewers’ heads”
329. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”
330. “Outliers are those that have been given an opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”-Malcolm Gladwell , ‘Outliers.’
331. “When some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters.”
332. “What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.”
333. “Society frowns at disagreeableness. As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention. ” -Malcolm Gladwell.
334. “Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself.”
335. “One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis.”
336. “the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We”
337. “LeMay was uncompromising with his men in terms of how relentlessly he prepared and drilled them, but he was that way for a reason. Because he cared about them.”
338. “Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
339. “If a child’s development is impeded because of incomplete mourning of a loss, that child will be handicapped in acquiring the mutuality necessary for building an integrated identity and maintaining strong emotional ties,”
340. “The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
341. “In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.”
342. “Words belong to the person who wrote them”
343. “Insight is not a light bulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.” – Malcolm Gladwell
344. “...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.”
345. “The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.”
346. “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
347. “The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.”
348. “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.”
349. “Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”
350. “Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.” — Malcolm Gladwell
351. “That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.”
352. “If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.”
353. “Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.”
354. “You don’t manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
355. “If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
356. “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.” — Malcolm Gladwell
357. “We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas,.....”
358. “Don't look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
359. “You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.”
360. “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning” — Malcolm Gladwell
361. “There are two kinds of hot girls: Evil Hot Girls, and Hot Girls Who Are Also Sympathetic Good-Hearted People and Will Not Intentionally Destroy Your Life (HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL).”
362. “When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most underdogs don’t fight like David,” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
363. “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” — Malcolm Gladwell
364. “In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of "stickiness.”
365. “Suicide is coupled. The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”
366. “An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.”
367. “Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.”
368. “We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.”
369. “There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources- and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.” — Malcolm Gladwell
370. “Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive.”
371. “A study at the University of Utah found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he’ll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.”
372. “a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample”
373. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five…being a teacher is meaningful.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
374. “We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves.”
375. “The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.”
376. “Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.” Malcolm Gladwell
377. “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
378. “Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.”
379. “There is an important principle that guides our thinking about the relationship between parenting and money – and that principle is that more is not always better.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
380. “We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.”
381. “Quien no lo tiene, lo hace, y quien lo tiene, lo deshance. (He who doesn't have it, does it, and he who has it misuses it.)”
382. “People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.”
383. Take action and believe in yourself. Dreams do come true.
384. “They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act — and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment — are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.”
385. “Why should he (Pitino) care what the world of basketball thought of him?…that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
386. “If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”
387. “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
388. “All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.”
389. “What is an outlier?”
390. “The dreams of revolutionaries go awry when they are forced to confront an unanticipated obstacle – not a rational obstacle such as inexperience or haste or miscalculation, but something immovable.”
391. “Those three things -- autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward -- are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
392. “If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”
393. “We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.”
394. I’m not highly routinized, so I spend a lot of time wandering around New York City with my laptop in my bag, wondering where I’m going to end up next. It’s a fairly idyllic life for someone who likes writing. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
395. “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
396. “The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle’s ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated “Oh, my Lord, my God” seventy times over.8”
397. “It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,”
398. “The whole Redwood City (girls basketball team) philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
399. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
400. “twenty, so they’d be born in the late sixties.” “No, no,” Paula went on. “What month.” “I thought she was crazy,” Barnsley remembers. “But I looked through it, and what she was saying just jumped”
401. “Society frowns at disagreeableness. As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.”
402. “A Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word-of-mouth epidemics.”
403. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
404. “Emotion is contagious.” Malcolm Gladwell
405. “look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually”
406. “For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth.”
407. “When the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.”
408. My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn’t understand what you’re writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
409. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” — Malcolm Gladwell
410. “I try to be unafraid of making a fool of myself.” Malcolm Gladwell
411. “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.” – Malcolm Gladwell
412. “In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.” Malcolm Gladwell
413. “I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing.”
414. “The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”
415. “It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience; experience leads to proficiency; and the more proficient you are the more valuable you’ll be.”
416. “a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse.”
417. “The difference isn’t resources, it’s attitude.”
418. “The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.”
419. “If you want to bring a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior…you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
420. “That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.”
421. “Good writing does not fail or succeed on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you'll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head -- even if in the end you conclude someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.
422. “Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.” — Malcolm Gladwell
423. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”-Malcolm Gladwell. , ‘Outliers.’
424. “Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from — and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.”
425. “It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.”
426. “This is the gift of training and expertise—the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.”
427. “We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.”
428. “If you are a student – particularly a poor student – what you need is to have people around you asking the same questions…class-size reduction “steals away the peers that struggling students can learn from.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
429. “Gottman, it turns out, can teach us a great deal about the critical part of rapid cognition known as thin-slicing. Thin slicing refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”
430. “You need to be smart–but you need adversity to develop strength in order to use that intelligence in an un-ordinary or new way.”
431. “Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.”
432. “...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)”
433. “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities,”
434. I’ve always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
435. “The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control.”
436. “The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.”
437. “The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things that make for being a good parent.”
438. “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
439. “And everyone knows that it's better to have an expert show you -- and not just tell you -- how to play tennis or golf or a musical instrument. We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instructions.”
440. “But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries—all Goliaths—too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages. They don’t, of course.”
441. “When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in muscular changes so fleeting that they can only be captured with electronic sensors. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they’ll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy. We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other.”
442. “A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.” — Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
443. “The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”
444. “... it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.”
445. “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
446. “I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing, It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” Malcolm Gladwell
447. “Understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.”-Malcolm Gladwell.
448. “We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.”
449. “We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that—sometimes—we’re better off that way. 1.”
450. “But let's not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader and that means you've probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get around reading”
451. “Arousal leaves us mind-blind.”
452. “We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there's nothing in any of the histories we've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.”
453. “An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That’s one of the little-known facts.”
454. “But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even”
455. “Boys step back, and men step forward.”
456. “Corpses do not run about spreading panic.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
457. “Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions.”
458. “To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.”
459. “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.”-Malcolm Gladwell. , ‘Outliers.’
460. “Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”
461. “understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.”
462. “We have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious about what also can be good about large classes. It’s a strange thing isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning.”
463. “Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
464. “Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” -Malcolm Gladwell.
465. “We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.”
466. “There is an important principle that guides our thinking about the relationship between parenting and money - and that principle is that more is not always better.”
467. “Sixty-seven percent of the prime ministers surveyed lost a parent before the age of sixteen.” – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book David And Goliath.
468. “I don’t want to know the mistakes other people made. I don’t want to know what they did right. I’m going to develop what’s right myself.” – Carl Norden
469. “Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.”
470. “[Chris Langan] told me not long ago. "I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamt the answer and I can remember it. Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page.”
471. “In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”
472. “We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.” — Malcolm Gladwell
473. “It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”
474. “I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing…It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” – Malcolm Gladwell
475. “The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”
476. “I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.”
477. “Uno de los principales motivos por los que un catedrático acepta un sueldo inferior al que podría cobrar en la empresa privada es que la vida universitaria le da la libertad de hacer lo que quiera hacer, lo que considere correcto.”
478. I write these books to challenge my own feelings and theories. – Goodreads Interview, 2008
479. “To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten years? Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” — Malcolm Gladwell
480. “Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.”
481. “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for 22 minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after 30 seconds.”
482. “The genius of the Bomber Mafia was to understand that distinction – and to say, We don’t have to slaughter the innocent, burn them beyond recognition, in pursuit of our military goals. We can do better. And they were right.”
483. “The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.”
484. “If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way - who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites - it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk to a member of a minority, you aren't betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.”
485. “All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we're deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.”
486. “Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
487. “Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.”
488. “The paradox of talking to strangers: we need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it (p. 166).”
489. “The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect. That’s actually a faster way to engage with what they’re getting at than to lob grenades in their direction…
490. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfils us. Being a teacher is meaningful.” Malcolm Gladwell
491. “The Air Force is utterly uninterested in heritage and tradition. On the contrary, it wants to be modern… The Air Force is obsessed with tomorrow, and with how technology will prepare it for tomorrow.”
492. “One of Gottman’s findings is that for a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter has to be at least five to one.”
493. “movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines—what passed in those days for computer terminals.”
494. “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.” — Malcolm Gladwell
495. “What he meant was that the face has, to a large extent, a mind of its own. This doesn’t mean we have no control over our faces. We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses. But, often, some little part of that suppressed emotion — such as the sense that I’m really unhappy even if I deny it — leaks out. That’s what happened to Mary. Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. But our involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings.”
496. “Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might than the other. How often do you think the bigger side wins? Most of us, I think, would put that number at close to 100 percent. A tenfold difference is a lot. But the actual answer may surprise you. When the political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft did the calculation a few years ago, what he came up with was 71.5 percent. Just under a third of the time, the weaker country wins.
497. “The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.” — Malcolm Gladwell
498. “We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration... The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.”
499. “Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way…We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that – sometimes – we’re better off that way.” – Malcolm Gladwell
500. “Spontaneity isn’t random.”
501. “The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.”
502. “This is the real lesson of Blink: It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works — and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment — it is our responsibility to act.”