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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

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Make
Ability
Glimpse
Good
Success
Engage
Think
Else
Fail
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Someone
Communication
Doe
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More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person.By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.
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Activism that challenges the status quo, that attacks deeply rooted problems, is not for the faint of heart.
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The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
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For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.
Malcolm Gladwell
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I'm totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it's OK because I'm doing it for a reason, for a good reason.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.
Malcolm Gladwell
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By shifting the balance away from the individual we open the door for the individual. Because we make it obvious that anyone can do it given the right circumstance.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.
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People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.
Malcolm Gladwell
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...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.
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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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
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I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.
Malcolm Gladwell
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We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.
Malcolm Gladwell
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We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability-relentl ess effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.
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.
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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