Malcolm Gladwell > Quotes

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“..... 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

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuede. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone elses head.
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― Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

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

“In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Emotion is contagious.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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-yar-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? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success - the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history - with a society that provides opportunites for all. ”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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, Outliers: The Story of Success

“If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires”
― Malcolm Gladwell

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

“There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible an depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But 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. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Those three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. 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 role preparation seems to play.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Arousal leaves us mind-blind.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. . . . spontaneity isn't random.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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

“We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

“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, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Achievement is talent plus preparation”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“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, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking