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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
Skills
High
Improvisers
Often
Improvisation
Action
Skill
Good
Block
Degree
Develop
Degrees

More quotes by 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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Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.
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What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
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Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
Malcolm Gladwell
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We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.
Malcolm Gladwell
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There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.
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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If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.
Malcolm Gladwell
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If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’.
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There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
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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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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Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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I have a new way of doing things, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell