Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

99 Sourced Quotes

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

Malcolm Gladwell
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
We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

Malcolm Gladwell
The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.

Malcolm Gladwell
No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.

Malcolm Gladwell
Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.

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

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

Malcolm Gladwell
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
Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Malcolm Gladwell
The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

Malcolm Gladwell
The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.

Malcolm Gladwell
Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

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

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

Malcolm Gladwell
I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing.... It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

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

Malcolm Gladwell
A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

Malcolm Gladwell
To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what's ten years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

Malcolm Gladwell
Those three things — autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward — are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Malcolm Gladwell
There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible.

Malcolm Gladwell