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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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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
World
Simple
Cling
Success
Merit
Idea
Rules
Individual
Function
Write
Choose
Ideas
Grow
Matter
Grows
Writing
Society
Outliers

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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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.
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It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.
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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.
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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.
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A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.
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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. Being a teacher is meaningful.
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Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.
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There is nothing more common than critics of journalists accusing them of practicing journalism. It is our function in the world to take things that are complicated and render them in a form that non-experts can follow and make sense of.
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Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.
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People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.
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I have a new way of doing things, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.
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When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.
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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!
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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.
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Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.
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Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.
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People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.
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That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
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The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
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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.
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