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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Terrifies
Annoys
Incompetence
Annoying

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The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.
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What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.
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To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.
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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.
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Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.
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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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I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
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We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability-relentl ess effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.
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We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.
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The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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So the first task of a police force is not to fight crime and enforce the law. It is to establish legitimacy with the law-abiding citizenry and then fight crime and enforce the law.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is - is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?
Malcolm Gladwell
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Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.
Malcolm Gladwell
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It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.
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