Quote

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

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Problem
Outliers
Human
Explanations
Humans
Blink
Come
Quick
Really
Explanation
Things
Beings
Bits
Success

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Trump is an innovator who has shown how out of step the political establishment was. Which I think, probably, in the long term will be healthy. We have to figure out how to reinvigorate our political institutions and he's demonstrating to us the urgency of that task.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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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
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Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Have you ever wondered... how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists... but the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.
Malcolm Gladwell
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All artists have to do that at a certain point. This shift that has to happen between the initial moment of creation and then the consideration of what has been created.
Malcolm Gladwell
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A fan is always an outsider. Most sportswriters are not, by this definition, fans. They capitalize on access to athletes. They spoke to Kobe last night, and Kobe says his finger is going to be fine. They spent three days fly-fishing with Brett Favre in March, and Brett says he's definitely coming back for another season.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Jenny Simpson loses her shoe in the women's fifteen hundred, with a lap and a half to go, destroying her chances to repeat as world champion, and she gives the most gracious interview afterward about how she's had a wonderful career already. Great for Jenny Simpson. Bad for the sport! We need drama!
Malcolm Gladwell
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Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Emotion is contagious.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.
Malcolm Gladwell
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What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.
Malcolm Gladwell
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I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.
Malcolm Gladwell