Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.

I'm totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it's OK because I'm doing it for a reason, for a good reason.

It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.

My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.

The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.

Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.

When I saw the kouros for the first time," he said, "I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.

[ ... ] the sense of entitlement [ ... ] is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world

There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

If you think about the class-size puzzle this way, then what seems baffling starts to make a little more sense.

I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.

Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals.

We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.

You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.

But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.

They were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.

Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.

Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

Extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make

An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.

As human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.

The sad thing about doping is how much it obscures our appreciation of greatness.

It would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.

one. It's the kind of really hard question that comes at the end of the Raven's.

Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.

Occasions when you can change your mind should be cherished, because they mean you're smarter than you were before.

That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.

Don't get me wrong. I love my mother-in-law. It's her daughter I can't figure out.

In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.

Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.

We should be firing bad teachers.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.

Words belong to the person who wrote them

General intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.

The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.

We [people] can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.

You think it matters to the kids whether they're learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano?

A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis.

Gosh darn it," Gau said, "if you don't try, you'll never succeed." 10.

If I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly,

All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.

The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.

The power of positive thinking will overcome so many things

The actual experience of the thing that was feared is a lot less scary than the person imagined.

Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

rep" squad - the all-star

I think that persistence and stubbornness and hard work are probably, at the end of the day, more important than the willingness to take a risk.

Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth.

Visionaries are limited by their visions.

Flom had the same experience ... He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.

To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

The world we could have is so much richer than the world we have settled for.

all that much. 3 Clear first described his ideas some years ago in a research paper entitled

You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?

Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.

Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.

He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.

If people disobey, don't ask what is wrong with them, ask what's wrong with their leaders.

When you remove time," de becker says, "you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction

There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.

Arousal leaves us mind-blind.

I've had the most untraumatic life a human being can have. But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.

In the government's eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.

What Wolf began to realize was that

talked to every person aged twenty-one

I think when one's working, one works between absolute confidence and absolute doubt, and I got a huge dallop of each.

Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,

Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Change your mind about something significant every day.

If you're skinny and you can't play hockey in Canada, you aren't left with a lot of options. I was left with running.

A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.

The giant's name was Goliath. The shepherd boy's name was David.

The simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice,

A handicap is like trying to race and you have a ten pound weight stuck to your waist. That is a handicap.

It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.

David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.

When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.

You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.

The Law of the Few, ... says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger.

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.

That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren't much good until late in their careers.

Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.

With his trademark counterintuitive logic how the habits of highly successful people pale in

Through embracing the diversity of humans beings, we will find a sure way to true happiness.

The people at the top don't just work harder. They work much, much harder.

leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine - Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run

There is a place for hyperbole and I believe it's the back jacket of books

From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.

a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample

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.

But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

Because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work,

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.