Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.
Malcolm GladwellIf you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
Malcolm GladwellWe tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability-relentl ess effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.
Malcolm GladwellIf we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.
Malcolm GladwellIt 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 GladwellTo become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher 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