Malcolm Gladwell Quotes
We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.
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.
When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.
Outlier are those who have been given opportunities-- -and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.
A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.
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.
The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.
Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.
People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.
The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
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.
We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
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.
Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
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.
No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
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.
...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)
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.
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?
In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.
Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters-first and foremost-how they behave.
The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.
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.
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.
Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.
We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves.
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.