Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

the 10,000hr rule is a definite key in success

...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)

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

When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.

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

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

My point is that the great challenge of an artist is to balance those two things: to be strong enough to have your own personal vision that you will put on the page or the canvas or the screen, no matter what people say, but it requires a radical sensitivity. You have to be completely open to what the world is telling you, to what your audience tells you. And balancing those two things is nearly impossible.

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 the role preparation seems to play.

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

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.

Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.

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.

I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?

There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day.

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.

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. This is the critical lesson of improve, too, and it is also a key to understanding a puzzle of Millennium Challenge: spontaneity isn't random.

Our intuitions, as humans, aren't always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.

I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.

Science fiction annoyed me because it was like, "Why is the world as it is not enough for you?"

So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.

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.

When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters-first and foremost-how they behave.

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.

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

Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.

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.

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.

Arousal leaves us mind-blind.

There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

A fan is always an outsider. Most sportswriters are not, by this definition, fans. They capitalize on access to athletes. They spoke to Kobe last night, and Kobe says his finger is going to be fine. They spent three days fly-fishing with Brett Favre in March, and Brett says he's definitely coming back for another season.

People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.

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

A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.

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.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, it's how you use the bombs you have - and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all.

As a writer, I know that - you write a first draft and then put it in a drawer. The longer I can put it in a drawer, the better off I am. So I structure my writing so that things can sit.

I'm someone who can provide an intellectual framework, but I can't tell people who are trying to sell Product X how to do that because I don't know, and I would be faking it if I attempted to step into that role.

We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.

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?

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.