Malcolm Gladwell - People Quotes

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

Malcolm Gladwell
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters-first and foremost-how they behave.

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
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
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
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
Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Malcolm Gladwell
The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up.

Malcolm Gladwell
If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.

Malcolm Gladwell
Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

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
If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior.... You need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

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
If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

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
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
I've always been drawn to those who are exceptional or weird in some way... and the book is about people whose achievement exceeds every expectation. What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve.

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
You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

Malcolm Gladwell