Malcolm Gladwell Quotes - Page 6

Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.

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

understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.

Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.

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.

Visionaries are limited by their visions.

When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.

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.

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.

I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.