Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

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.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.

[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.

if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition

What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.

Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.

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.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.

Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.

A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.

The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.

Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.

The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.

Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

Why are man hole covers around?" If you don't knwo the answer to the questions, you're not smart enough to work at microsoft

the 10,000hr rule is a definite key in success

Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas.

I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?

It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.

I don't want to be like the angry old guy in the corner who is always ranting and raving about the same things - but I don't mind doing that just a little bit!

So the first task of a police force is not to fight crime and enforce the law. It is to establish legitimacy with the law-abiding citizenry and then fight crime and enforce the law.

One of the things I think the police have to do is to stop behaving like armies.

There are lots of issues more important than where billionaires donate their money.

Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.

being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience

When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

I don't like things that aren't true.

Science fiction annoyed me because it was like, "Why is the world as it is not enough for you?"

All artists have to do that at a certain point. This shift that has to happen between the initial moment of creation and then the consideration of what has been created.

Anyone who knows the marketing world knows that ideas come and go, and people latch onto things and think of them as a kind of solution.

Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They'd have nothing to blog about.

What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.

People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.

By shifting the balance away from the individual we open the door for the individual. Because we make it obvious that anyone can do it given the right circumstance.

I'm totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it's OK because I'm doing it for a reason, for a good reason.

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

So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.

It changes how people read you if you believe in God. It gives insight into your motivation, how you look at problems and how you deal with people.

Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?

Our intuitions, as humans, aren't always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.