Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

99 Sourced Quotes

You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?

Malcolm Gladwell
It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.

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

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

Malcolm Gladwell
Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer... But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable... They are people willing to take social risks-to do things that others might disapprove of.

Malcolm Gladwell
Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key area. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesman are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on these three groups. No one else matters.

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

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

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

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
It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research.

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

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

Malcolm Gladwell
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

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

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

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 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.

Malcolm Gladwell
The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence." To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

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
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.

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

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

Malcolm Gladwell
Extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress.

Malcolm Gladwell
People are in one of two states in a relationship, Gottman went on. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It's like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they'll say, 'Oh, he's just in a crummy mood.' Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.

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
It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.

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
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.

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

Malcolm Gladwell