Hana Bilqisthi > Hana's 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

“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

“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, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

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

“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?”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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

“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

“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

“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

“We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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

“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

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

“if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition”
― 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, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; 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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.”
― Chuck Close

“I'm so involved in the process that sometimes at the end of a day, I can look at the piece on my desk and really wonder how it got there. At other times, I really have to struggle with a piece to turn it into what I had in mind. Sometimes, I give up and leave it half finished to work on something else. Then in a few days, when I come back to it, I can see what it wants to be... which sometimes is not at all what I had in mind. When I just let that happen, things seem to go more smoothly.”
― Wendy Froud