Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

selection decisions until maturity ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

In a devastating critique, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites - and ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan - the architect of Israel's astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War - also wrote an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, David fought Goliath not with inferior but (on the contrary) with superior weaponry; and his greatness consisted not in his being willing to go out into battle against someone far stronger than he was. But in his knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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? ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

As human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice, ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

that made the unfamiliar familiar. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I think actually the marketing community is approaching a crisis: There are just too many messages competing for too little attention. That is the fundamental problem. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went ~ Malcolm Gladwell

You think it matters to the kids whether they're learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano? ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

General intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire, and trust. The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Visionaries are limited by their visions. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

When crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars - we're surprised. I'm saying, don't be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

Forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice
that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

There were history's gifts to my family-and if the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would now live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill? ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. 1. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Criticism is a privilege that you earn - it shouldn't be your opening move in an interaction… ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that's exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The term used by linguists to describe what Klotz was engaging in in that moment is "mitigated speech," which refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we're being deferential to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, you don't say, "I'll need this by ~ Malcolm Gladwell

People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they are ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

Malcolm Gladwell can't help being a pinhead. He was probably born that way. ~ Gregory Cochran

If we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition ~ Malcolm Gladwell

From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

If I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly, ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The military had been transformed, and with that, the Pentagon confidently turned its attention to the real Persian Gulf. A rogue dictator was threatening the stability of the region. He was virulently anti-American. He had a considerable power base from strong religious and ethnic loyalties and was thought to be harboring terrorist organizations. He need to be replaced and his country restored to stability, and if they did it right - if they had CROP and PMESI and DIME - how hard could that be? ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

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

But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do - or don't do - to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

How good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand-things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability," says Anderson. "For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, the not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And Blue's Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Human Rights Watch: Nationwide, the rate of drug admissions to state prison for black men is thirteen times greater than the rate for white men. In ten states black men are sent to state prison on drug charges at rates that are 26 to 57 times greater than those of white men in the same state. In Illinois, for example, the state with the highest rate of black male drug offender admissions to prison, a black man is 57 times more likely to be sent to prison on drug charges than a white man. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

There is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I think overall it's a disadvantage," Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The music critic Harold Schonberg goes further: Mozart, he argues, actually "developed late," since he didn't produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than twenty years. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the heart of a Mennonite community. All my family are part of the Mennonite church. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

But in the end it comes down to a matter of respect, and the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice, and the most corsive tone of voice that a doctor can assume is a dominant tone. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that," the son of the billionaire investor George Soros has said. "But I remember seeing it as a kid, and thinking, At least half of this is bull. I mean, you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. He literally goes into a spasm, and it's this early warning sign. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

It is not possible to staff a large company without short people. There simply aren't enough tall people to go around. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us? ~ Malcolm Gladwell

If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then-whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software-he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from - and when we ignore that fact, planes crash. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas, ... ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

are many studies that say they can't find a statistically significant effect of some policy change," Hoxby says. "That doesn't mean that there wasn't an effect. It just means that they couldn't find it in the data. In this study, I ~ Malcolm Gladwell

When you remove time," de becker says, "you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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

In the Big Pond chapter, I talked about the fact that being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests. ~ Malcolm Gladwell