Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Malcolm Gladwell - Page 4

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making - it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.

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.

The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.

People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.

Instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop.

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

My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.

Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.

People don't rise from nothing.

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.

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

Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.

The biggest mistake we make is trying to square the way we feel about something today with the way we felt about it yesterday. You shouldn’t even bother doing it. You should just figure out the way you feel today and if it happens to comply with what you thought before, fine. If it contradicts it, whatever. Life goes on.

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.

A study at the University of Utah found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he’ll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.

We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.

It's not about how smart you are. It's about your values.

You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?

understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.

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.

You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

I have a new way of doing things, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

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.

I became convinced that knowing lots of people was kind of skill, something that the diligent can overcome.

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.

You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.

Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way...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.

We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.

Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.

The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control.

I recently talked to an eighteen-year-old - a huge FIFA fan - and realized that he spends more time playing the FIFA video game than he does watching actual FIFA games.

If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too.

When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.

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.

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.

When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement. If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she’s truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of “smart”?

Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.

There’s this powerful phrase in the legal world, “Difficult cases make bad law.” The exception is the difficult case. You can’t generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don’t solve any problem because they’re so one of a kind.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.

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.

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

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.

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.

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

We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability-relentl ess effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

Now I basically just read spy stories because they're about solving a puzzle within the constraints of history. It's the tick tock, the clockwork that I'm interested in.

An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.

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.

Visionaries are limited by their visions.

I think that persistence and stubbornness and hard work are probably, at the end of the day, more important than the willingness to take a risk.