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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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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Think
Decision
Mediocre
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Less
Selection
People
Comes
Rational
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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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Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
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If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.
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Every cop will tell you that their real job is being a social worker. That's what they do all day. The large majority of police officers in this country never even draw their gun, let alone fire it. They do conflict resolution, right? And if that's their job, why do they need to look like they're an occupying force?
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It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience experience leads to proficiency and the more proficient you are the more valuable you'll be.
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Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?
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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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The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.
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Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.
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We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
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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.
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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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What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
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David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - The Sports Gene - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an all-star challenge on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decat
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The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.
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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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What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.
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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.
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That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
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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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