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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

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Making
Bases
Experience
Instinct
Firsts
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First
Judging
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More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.
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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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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A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.
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 a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Change your mind about something significant every day.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person.By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.
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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Occasions when you can change your mind should be cherished, because they mean you're smarter than you were before.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. the internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency.
Malcolm Gladwell
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By shifting the balance away from the individual we open the door for the individual. Because we make it obvious that anyone can do it given the right circumstance.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell