Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

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

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.

Nobody accomplishes success by themselves.

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.

Emotion is contagious.

Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.

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.

People don't rise from nothing.

We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.

What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.

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.

Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.

Arousal leaves us mind-blind.

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.

The difference isn't resources, it's attitude.

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.

Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is - is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?

Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

We vary greatly in the natural advantages that we've been given. The world's not fair

The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.

The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as "steroids.

Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making - it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard.

We can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

I recently talked to an eighteen-year-old - a huge FIFA fan - and realized that he spends more time playing the FIFA video game than he does watching actual FIFA games.

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.

What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.

Activism that challenges the status quo, that attacks deeply rooted problems, is not for the faint of heart.

Television allows the audience to argue with the creator in a way you don't in a movie.

Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

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

The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.

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

Since becoming a journalist, each time I engage with subjects I become more radicalized.

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.

The answer is that 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.

Visionaries are limited by their visions.

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

An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.

I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.

You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.

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.

I became convinced that knowing lots of people was kind of skill, something that the diligent can overcome.