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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

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Seems
Achievement
Psychologists
Problem
Role
Psychologist
Bigger
Innate
Look
View
Gifted
Play
Careers
Smaller
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Talent
Closer
Roles
Plus
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Preparation
Outliers

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Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
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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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In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.
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The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.
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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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I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.
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What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.
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There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.
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Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.
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Occasions when you can change your mind should be cherished, because they mean you're smarter than you were before.
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There’s this powerful phrase in the legal world, “Difficult cases make bad law.” The exception is the difficult case. You can’t generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don’t solve any problem because they’re so one of a kind.
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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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There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.
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I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.
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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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There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.
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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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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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Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
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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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