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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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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
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More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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You may hate Hillary Clinton and you may have good reason for hating Hillary Clinton, but Hillary Clinton is one person who even if she's elected will be gone one day and you still have the task of keeping American democracy going.
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.
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People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
Malcolm Gladwell
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If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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Emotion is contagious.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs.
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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People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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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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What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.
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