Malcolm gladwell quotes

Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

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.

Success is not a function of individual talent. It's the steady accumulation of advantages. It's bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Occasions when you can change your mind should be cherished, because they mean you're smarter than you were before.

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

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

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.

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

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

The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.

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

[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.

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.

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

Change your mind about something significant every day.

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

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.

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

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.

I suspect people who are indecisive are people who are far too enamored of analysis in all settings and are destroying their ability to make an instinctive judgment through over-analysis and that's dangerous.

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.

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.

Emotion is contagious.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.

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.

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.

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

When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.

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.

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.

Sometimes the most modest changes can bring about enormous effects.

Achievement is talent plus preparation

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

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.

If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.

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

The successful are those who have been given opportunities.

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

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.

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.

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

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

If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’.

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

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

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

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 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.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

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

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.

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.

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

Nobody accomplishes success by themselves.

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

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

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

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.

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

Working really hard is what successful people do.

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.

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

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

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.

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

It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.

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

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

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.

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 difference isn't resources, it's attitude.

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.

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