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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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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Degrees
Skills
High
Improvisers
Often
Improvisation
Action
Skill
Good
Block
Degree
Develop

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.
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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.
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Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.
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I'm totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it's OK because I'm doing it for a reason, for a good reason.
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Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.
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The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
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My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.
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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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You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.
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Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.
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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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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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You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
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Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.
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What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.
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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.
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