Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Malcolm Gladwell - Page 3

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

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.

There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

To 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.

The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.

There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

Achievement is talent plus preparation

I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.

Nobody accomplishes success by themselves.

The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.

Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. the internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency.

Through embracing the diversity of humans beings, we will find a sure way to true happiness.

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

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

The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.

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.

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.

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.

Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key area. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesman are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic , your resources ought to be solely concentrated on these three groups. No one else matters.

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?

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.

To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.

Emotion is contagious.

Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence." To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

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.

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.

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.

Success is deeply rooted in time and place. You may have the drive to read tons of books on biology. But if there are no books on biology in your library, and the library is never open, your drive is meaningless.

Activism that challenges the status quo, that attacks deeply rooted problems, is not for the faint of heart.

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.

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.

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

Change your mind about something significant every day.

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.

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

The successful are those who have been given opportunities.

Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.

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.

We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves.

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

If you're in business it's both a promise and a warning. It says that sometimes little things can cause some little guy to have an overnight success.

Working really hard is what successful people do.

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.

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.