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It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.

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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More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.
Malcolm Gladwell
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I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
Malcolm Gladwell
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My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.
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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You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.
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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You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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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
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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.
Malcolm Gladwell