Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Malcolm Gladwell
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.
I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the heart of a Mennonite community. All my family are part of the Mennonite church.
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.
You don't train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly people who want to help others optimize their physical and psychological health, and then have them run a claims-processing operation for insurance companies.
I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.
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.'
There is an important idea in psychology: The 'just world theory,' which says that it is very important for us to convince ourselves that the world is just and things happen for a reason. That there is some elemental fairness in everything, which creates the illusion of justice.
If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.
An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
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.
That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.
We aren't, as human beings, very good at acting in our best interest.
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.
The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far, his hematocrit will fall.
If you're skinny and you can't play hockey in Canada, you aren't left with a lot of options. I was left with running.
When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.
The underdog winning is the romantic position.
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?
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.
It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
Take the great example of the four-minute mile. One guy breaks it, then all of a sudden everyone breaks it. And they break it in such a short period of time that it can't be because they were training harder. It's purely that it was a psychological barrier, and someone had to show them that they could do it.
We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community.
The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.
So, it's a very, you know - maybe we're wrong in - you know, we go around thinking the innovator is the person who's first to kind of conceive of something. And maybe the innovation process continues down the line to the second and the third and the fourth entrant into a field.
What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
My rule is that if I interview someone, they should never read what I have to say about them and regret having given me the interview.
From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.
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.
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?
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.
I try to be unafraid of making a fool of myself.
If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.
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.
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.
My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.
If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.
You think it matters to the kids whether they're learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano?
When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this drives me crazy. Why can't there be a stairway? At least make it as easy to exercise as it is to not exercise. It's in society's interest for me to take the stairs.
Do you remember the wrestler Andre the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly.
My mother read me biblical stories at night.
Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.
Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.
An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.
I never had those dreams of making the Olympics. Never.
The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.
If I was President of the United States, I'd rather be right than interesting. If I was CEO of a company, I'd rather be right than interesting. But I'm a journalist - what journalist would rather be right than interesting?
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.
We should be firing bad teachers.
I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.
As a writer, the best mindset is to be unafraid.
If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience!
A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.
The most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly.
Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.
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.
If Harvard is $60,000 and University of Toronto, where I went to school, is maybe six. So you're really telling me that education is 10 times better at Harvard than it is at University of Toronto? That seems ridiculous to me.
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