Famous Quotes & Sayings

Malcolm Gladwell Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Malcolm Gladwell.

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Famous Quotes By Malcolm Gladwell

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I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing ... It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't. — Malcolm Gladwell

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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. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then-whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software-he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand. — Malcolm Gladwell

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At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. — Malcolm Gladwell

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It would be a mistake, however, to think that Connectors are the only people who matter in a social epidemic. Roger Horchow sent out a dozen faxes promoting his daughter's friend's new restaurant. But he didn't discover that restaurant. Someone else did and told him about it. At some point in the rise of Hush Puppies, the shoes were discovered by Connectors, who broadcast the return of Hush Puppies far and wide. but who told the Connectors about Hush Puppies? It's possible that Connectors learn about new information by an entirely random process, that because they know so many people they get access to new things wherever they pop up. If you look closely at social epidemics, however, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also people we rely upon to connect us with new information. There are people specialists, and there are information specialists. — Malcolm Gladwell

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In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more - which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Age-class running, as you know, is completely unreliable. It's based on this artificial thing, which is that people who are the same age have the same level of physical maturity. Which just isn't true. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Imagine that you are a doctor and you suddenly learn that you'll see twenty patients on a Friday afternoon instead of twenty-five, while getting paid the same. Would you respond by spending more time with each patient? Or would you simply leave at six-thirty instead of seven-thirty and have dinner with your kids? — Malcolm Gladwell

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I don't think I will ever write about politics or foreign policy. I feel like there is so much good writing in those areas that I have little to add. I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from - and when we ignore that fact, planes crash. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Biologists often talk about the "ecology" of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. — Malcolm Gladwell

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from centuries past, as well as contemporary billionaires, such — Malcolm Gladwell

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If you're last in your class at Harvard, it doesn't feel like you're a good student, even though you really are. It's not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their equivalents-the smoking versions of R. and Tom Gau and Gaetan Dugas. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group-a select few-are responsible for driving the epidemic forward. — Malcolm Gladwell

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His becoming a true outlier, we have to know a lot more about him than that. — Malcolm Gladwell

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We used to say poor people had lousy genes. Then we decided that wasn't OK, but we transferred the prejudice to upbringing. We said, 'You were neglected as a child, so you'll never make it.' That's just as pernicious. — Malcolm Gladwell

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The most intriguing candidate for that "something else" is called the Broken Windows theory. Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes: — Malcolm Gladwell

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I'm just trying to say that it should reassure us that the inevitable traumas of being human do end up producing some good. Otherwise, the human condition is overwhelmingly depressing. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant - given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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He watched David approach, first with scorn, then with surprise, and then with what can only have been horror - as it dawned on him that the battle he was expecting had suddenly changed shape. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long. — Malcolm Gladwell

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But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that's exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment. — Malcolm Gladwell

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I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups
and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand ... you have to go back to the past ... it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. — Malcolm Gladwell

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David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - "The Sports Gene" - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an "all-star challenge" on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decathlon. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine. — Malcolm Gladwell

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What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone. — Malcolm Gladwell

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I try to be unafraid of making a fool of myself. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Western communication has what linguists call a "transmitter orientation"
that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously ... within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message. — Malcolm Gladwell

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I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. but with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret - and decode - what lies behind our snap judgment and first impressions. — Malcolm Gladwell

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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. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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Mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. 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. Put a bunch of Renees in a classroom, and give them the space and time to explore mathematics for themselves, — Malcolm Gladwell

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are many studies that say they can't find a statistically significant effect of some policy change," Hoxby says. "That doesn't mean that there wasn't an effect. It just means that they couldn't find it in the data. In this study, I — Malcolm Gladwell

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Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can't easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. — Malcolm Gladwell

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To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish. — Malcolm Gladwell

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For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty - again, not a large number. — Malcolm Gladwell

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[Chris Langan] told me not long ago. "I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamt the answer and I can remember it. Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Working really hard is what successful people do ... — Malcolm Gladwell

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We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often. — Malcolm Gladwell

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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. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress. — Malcolm Gladwell

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talked to every person aged twenty-one — Malcolm Gladwell

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In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more. — Malcolm Gladwell

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We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way. 1. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Success is not a function of individual talent. It's the steady accumulation of advantages. It's bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Our power of thin-slicing and snap judgment are extraordinary.but even the giant computer in our unconscious need a moment to do its work. — Malcolm Gladwell

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We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren't and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. — Malcolm Gladwell

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We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds. — Malcolm Gladwell

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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. — Malcolm Gladwell

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We have, in short, somehow become convinced that we need to tackle the whole problem, all at once. But the truth is that we don't. We only need to find the stickiness Tipping Points, — Malcolm Gladwell

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Under time pressure, they began to behave just as people do when they are highly aroused. they stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses and fell back on a rigid and unyielding system, a stereotype. — Malcolm Gladwell

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To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success
the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history
with a society that provides opportunities for all. — Malcolm Gladwell

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You walk into the class in second grade. You can't read. What are you going to do if you're going to make it? You identify the smart kid. You make friends with him. You sit next to him. You grow a team around you. You delegate your work to others. You learn how to talk your way out of a tight spot. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Have you ever wondered ... how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists ... but the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen. — Malcolm Gladwell

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I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties. — Malcolm Gladwell

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We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Concerted cultivation. He gets taken to museums and gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp, where he takes classes. When he's bored at home, there are plenty of books to read, and his parents see it as their responsibility to keep him actively engaged in the world around him. It's not hard to see how Alex would get better at reading and math over the summer. — Malcolm Gladwell

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You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first. — Malcolm Gladwell

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If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major, they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don't. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it. — Malcolm Gladwell

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The tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We — Malcolm Gladwell

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Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant. — Malcolm Gladwell

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If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing? — Malcolm Gladwell

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The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point. — Malcolm Gladwell

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All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we're deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior. — Malcolm Gladwell

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It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences. — Malcolm Gladwell

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But the problem was, Sacks wasn't comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country - and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even — Malcolm Gladwell

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There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources- and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people "senders. — Malcolm Gladwell

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What is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily. — Malcolm Gladwell

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The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence. — Malcolm Gladwell

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We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration. ... The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage. — Malcolm Gladwell

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The principle elements of a puzzle all require the application of energy and persistence, which are the virtues of youth. Mysteries demand experience and insight. — Malcolm Gladwell

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If we want to, say, develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighborhoods, this tells us that we're probably better off building lots of little schools than one or two big ones. — Malcolm Gladwell

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History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized up his opponent long ago in the Valley of Elah. And in a different time and in a very different age, — Malcolm Gladwell

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

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The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world. — Malcolm Gladwell

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Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick a blanket This is an example of what's called a divergence test — Malcolm Gladwell