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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
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Outliers
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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.
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When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
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Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
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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.
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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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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.
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Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.
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I would say first of all, anyone who wants to challenge the status quo always gets that response. Ninety percent of the time, that's just bull. That's just the way in which people choose to prop up their own privilege or their own particular position. So mostly I shrug it off.
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The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.
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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.
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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.
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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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I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.
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Our intuitions, as humans, aren't always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.
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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
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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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being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience
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Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs.
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Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.
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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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