Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Malcolm Gladwell - Page 5

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.

Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.

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.

I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.

It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.

The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.

That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.

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

I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.

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

The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.

People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.

If your parents are billionaires, that might actually be an obstacle to your own happiness and self-development. If you go to Oxford or Harvard, that might actually thwart your desire to graduate with a science or math degree.

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.

I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.

My point is that the great challenge of an artist is to balance those two things: to be strong enough to have your own personal vision that you will put on the page or the canvas or the screen, no matter what people say, but it requires a radical sensitivity. You have to be completely open to what the world is telling you, to what your audience tells you. And balancing those two things is nearly impossible.

Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.

The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

We vary greatly in the natural advantages that we've been given. The world's not fair

[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.

Since becoming a journalist, each time I engage with subjects I become more radicalized.

Television allows the audience to argue with the creator in a way you don't in a movie.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

In a country that never wins anything: in Canada, if one of our athletes so much as makes the final in a World Championship, we declare a national holiday.

There are some people, who I'll charitably call snobs, who are dismissive of any conversation that doesn't begin with the full level of complexity. That's just not how the world works.

What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.

I interviewed one of the most powerful lawyers in the world and he told me, "At the time, it was the worst thing in the world not to be able to get a job at a fancy law firm, but it's the greatest thing that ever happened in my life." It was a humble acknowledgment of how forces much larger than himself shaped his career. I really wanted to bring that point home.

It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. 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.

We can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

Arousal leaves us mind-blind.

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.

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.

You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.

Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.

Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.

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.

Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; 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.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.

The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances.

Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs.

if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition

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.

The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

I'm necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I'm still a parasite.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.

Shortly after the birth control pill was approved for public distribution, one woman wrote to John Rock, its inventor, "You should be afraid to meet your maker." Rock, despite being Catholic replied, "My dear Madam, in my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions."