Malcolm Gladwell Quotations | Page 4

If people disobey, don't ask what is wrong with them, ask what's wrong with their leaders.

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

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

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.

We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try.

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

If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too.

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

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.

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.

There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

There's this powerful phrase in the legal world, "Difficult cases make bad law." The exception is the difficult case. You can't generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don't solve any problem because they're so one of a kind.

Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.

The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.

Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.

Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.

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

I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.

Success is deeply rooted in time and place. You may have the drive to read tons of books on biology. But if there are no books on biology in your library, and the library is never open, your drive is meaningless.

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.

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.

We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.

Nobody accomplishes success by themselves.

The iPod is clearly a tipping point (and I'm not quite sure it is a wholly positive development), because it is a revolution in the way that we consume creative property, which I would call art. It has radically changed the relationship between the artist and the audience, how money changes hands, and how much money changes hands. Music was the first, and books are coming next. The Kindle or some form of electronic book is clearly inevitable, and it will massively reshape how books are sold, who pays for them, and how they're consumed. It is going to be really fascinating.

The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.

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.

[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.

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.

Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all,

You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.

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 the role preparation seems to play.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

When crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars - we're surprised. I'm saying, don't be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work.

The biggest mistake we make is trying to square the way we feel about something today with the way we felt about it yesterday. You shouldn’t even bother doing it. You should just figure out the way you feel today and if it happens to comply with what you thought before, fine. If it contradicts it, whatever. Life goes on.

Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.

I interviewed one of the most powerful lawyers in the world and he told me, "At the time, it was the worst thing in the world not to be able to get a job at a fancy law firm, but it's the greatest thing that ever happened in my life." It was a humble acknowledgment of how forces much larger than himself shaped his career. I really wanted to bring that point home.

I always resist seeing my own personal motivation in my work, but I guess it must be there on some level. And I do feel very much that my life follows the kinds of things I talk about in my books. I've always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level.

The successful are those who have been given opportunities,

There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.

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.

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?

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

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.