Quote

...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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Good
Position
Positions
Think
Decision
Mediocre
Thinking
Less
Selection
People
Comes
Rational
Find
Decisions
Important
Authority
Even
Deal
Way
Deals

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

Image
I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
If you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell