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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
Success
Merit
Idea
Rules
Individual
Function
Write
Choose
Ideas
Grow
Matter
Grows
Writing
Society
Outliers
World
Simple
Cling

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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 people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
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The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.
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The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Emotion is contagious.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They'd have nothing to blog about.
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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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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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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When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.
Malcolm Gladwell
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So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making - it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.
Malcolm Gladwell
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You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.
Malcolm Gladwell