Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

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.

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.

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.

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?

What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.

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

The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.

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

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 successful are those who have been given opportunities.

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.

There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.

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

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

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.

If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.

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

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

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.

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

The sad thing about doping is how much it obscures our appreciation of greatness.

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

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes the most modest changes can bring about enormous effects.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.

Achievement is talent plus preparation

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?

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

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

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

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