Elice > Elice's Quotes

“If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using? In the world of law enforcement, the word forensic refers to an investigation of the origins and scope of a criminal act: “reasons, culprits, and consequences.” Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Think about the psychology of that kind of change. “If you’re just below that tipping point—you’re at 20 percent—you have no idea how close you are,” Centola says. In one of the versions of his game, with twenty people, having four dissidents didn’t make the slightest difference. But when he added one more—bringing the outsiders up to the magic 25 percent mark—the consensus abruptly shifted. “You don’t know that [with] one or two more people, you could trigger that tipping point,” he said. If change happened gradually, you could see that you were getting closer and closer to your goal—and you wouldn’t be surprised when you reached it. But if nothing happens and then everything happens, you are in the strange position of being discouraged during the long stretch when nothing is happening and stunned at the point when it all shifts.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“I always like to quote this line from. Of Scottish writer Andrew Fletcher. “If I can write the songs of a nation, I don't care who writes their laws.” We need to pay more attention to the songs we're singing.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Liberals, moderates and conservatives in most cases disagreed strongly on hot button issues only if they didn't watch a lot of television. But the more television people of all ideological persuasions watched, the more they started to agree. When a large group of people watched the same stories night after night, it brings them together. Here’s Gross again, “it's not the media pushing this button to get that effect. Its media is creating the cultural consciousness about how the world works.” The stories told on television shaped the kinds of things people thought about the conversations they had, the things they valued. The things they dismissed and that shared experience was so powerful and transformative that knowing how much television someone watched was a better predictor of how they saw current issues than knowing who they voted for in the last election.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“When a woman is all alone, she stands out as a woman, but she becomes invisible as a person.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“The magic third turns up in all kinds of places. Take corporate boards, for example. They're among the most powerful institutions in the modern economy. Virtually every company of consequence has a group of typically around 9 experienced business people who provide guidance to the chief executive officer. Historically, boards have been all male, but slowly doors have opened to women and a body of research shows that having women on a board makes the board different. The research suggests that women on boards are more willing to ask difficult questions. They value collaboration more. They're better listeners. In other words, there's a woman effect. But how many women do you need on a board to get the woman effect? It isn't One…. It's just like Cantor predicted. When a woman is all alone, she stands out as a woman, but she becomes invisible as a person. Adding a second woman clearly helps, The study goes on, but it still wasn't enough. The magic seems to occur when three or more women serve on a board together. Three out of nine people. That magic third!”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Moving from the position that a problem belongs to all of us to the position that a problem is being caused by a few of us is really difficult.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“In medicine there is a term for the kind of illness that is caused by the intervention of doctors: iatrogenesis. You treat someone with a drug, and the side effects turn out to be worse than the disease. You do a minor operation, and the patient dies of complications. Iatrogenic illness is well-intentioned. No one is trying to harm the patient. But a doctor has no right to use the passive voice and speak of the patient who has been harmed.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“In Chapter 4, I talked about the strange dynamics of tipping points found in Damon Centola’s name game. Centola wanted to know how many “dissidents” it would take to disrupt a consensus reached by the majority. And his answer was, It doesn’t take a lot. Once 25 percent of the members of any group start pushing for a new name, the rest of the group quickly folds its cards and goes along.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“If you read your contract closely, it says that the show is to be ninety minutes in length. It is to cost X. That’s the budget. Nowhere in that do we ever say that it has to be good. And if you are so robotic and driven that you feel the pressure to push yourself in that way to make it good, don’t come to us and say you’ve been treated unfairly, because you’re trying hard to make it good and we’re getting in your way. Because at no point did we ask for it to be good. That you’re neurotic is a bonus to us. Our job is to lie, cheat, and steal—and your job is to do the show.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“They had to figure out a way to characterize me in some special way because I was with them—and I was not meant to be with them.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“If you understand the math behind compounding you realize the most important question is not “How can I earn the highest returns?” It’s “What are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time?” Little changes compounded for a long time create extraordinary changes. Same as ever.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Physicist Freeman Dyson once explained that what’s often attributed to the supernatural, or magic, or miracles, is actually just basic math. In any normal person’s life, miracles should occur at the rate of roughly one per month: The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about a million per month. If the chance of a “miracle” is one in a million, we should therefore experience one per month, on average.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Just like evolution, the key is realizing that the more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you generally are.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. 2. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. 3. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.”
― Tom Hiddleston

“Nassim Taleb says he’s a libertarian at the federal level, a Republican at the state level, a Democrat at the local level, and a socialist at the family level. People handle risk and responsibility in totally different ways when a group scales from 4 people to 100 to 100,000 to 100 million.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results, good and bad, as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“So species rarely evolve to become perfect at anything, because perfecting one skill comes at the expense of another skill that will eventually be critical to survival.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Nassim Taleb says, “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.” That gets to the heart of it.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Biologist Leslie Orgel used to say, “Evolution is cleverer than you are,” because whenever a critic says, “Evolution could never do that,” they usually just lacked imagination. It’s also easy to underestimate because of basic math. Evolution’s superpower is not just selecting favorable traits. That part is so tedious, and if it’s all you focus on you’ll be skeptical and confused. Most species’ change in any millennia is so trivial it’s unnoticeable. The real magic of evolution is that it’s been selecting traits for 3.8 billion years. The time, not the little changes, is what moves the needle.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Mark Twain once said he knew he was a successful author when Kaiser Wilhelm II said he’d read every Twain book, and later that day a porter at his hotel said the same. “Great books are wine,” Twain said, “but my books are water. But everybody drinks water.” He found the universal emotions that influence everyone, regardless of who they were or where they were from, and got them to nod their heads in the same direction. It’s nearly magic. Guiding people’s attention to a single point is one of the most powerful life skills.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“During World War II an unnamed U.S. soldier was interviewed by a newspaper. Asked what he was thinking during combat, the soldier replied: “I was hoping to remember to stay afraid because that is the best way to stay alive and not make careless mistakes.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced. And since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Or take Varlam Shalamov, a poet who spent fifteen years imprisoned in a gulag. He once wrote how quickly normal people can crack under stress and uncertainty. Take a good, honest, loving person and strip them of basic necessities and you’ll soon get an unrecognizable monster who’ll do anything to survive. Under high stress, “a man becomes a beast in three weeks,” Shalamov wrote.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friend.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales