Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Malcolm Gladwell - Page 2

Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.

The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.

I've had the most untraumatic life a human being can have. But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.

A runner needs not just to be skinny but - more specifically - to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That's why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect.

When people from organizations like the World Bank descended on Third World countries, they always tried to remove obstacles to development, to reduce economic anxiety and uncertainty.

It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.

We all assume that if you're weak and poor, you're never going to win. In fact, the real world is full of examples where the exact opposite happens, where the weak win and the strong screw up.

A handicap is like trying to race and you have a ten pound weight stuck to your waist. That is a handicap.

I am far more distress-avoidant than I am joy-seeking.

All my books are optimistic!

I don't golf. I've never golfed. I will never golf.

People in great institutions are occasionally credulous.

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.

Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.

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.

I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augmenting story-telling.

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

In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery.

In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles - a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles.

I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.

I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.

I don't want a door bell. I don't want anyone ringing my door bell... seems to be intrusive. They can call me on their cell phones.

If you're smarter than me, you shouldn't be reading my books.

I remember as a kid watching one of the Olympic games, and I was cheering for a big track athlete. He was the favorite to win, and he lost. I realized in that moment the pain he felt was so much greater than the pain that those who never thought they were going to win would have felt had they lost.

In my mid-adolescence, my friend Terry Martin and I became obsessed with William F. Buckley. This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization. Buckley seemed impossibly exotic.

In the government's eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.

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

Rarely do we stop and consider whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest.

I don't understand, given the constraints physicians have in doing their job and the paperwork demanded of them, why people want to be physicians. I think we've made it very, very difficult for them to perform their job. I think that's a shame.

People assume when my hair is long that I am a lot cooler than I actually am. I am not opposed to this misconception, by the way, but it is a misconception.

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

Shallow communities are relatively easy to build.

If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’.

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.

When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.

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

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

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

Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer ... But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable ... They are people willing to take social risks-to do things that others might disapprove of.

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

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

Sometimes the most modest changes can bring about enormous effects.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

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.

That's your responsibility as a person, as a human being - to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.

What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.

Occasions when you can change your mind should be cherished, because they mean you're smarter than you were before.

Outlier are those who have been given opportunities-- -and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

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

I suspect people who are indecisive are people who are far too enamored of analysis in all settings and are destroying their ability to make an instinctive judgment through over-analysis and that's dangerous.

Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.

If you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.

Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.

It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience; experience leads to proficiency; and the more proficient you are the more valuable you'll be.

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

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

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

If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.

The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.

No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.