Quote

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.

Malcolm Gladwell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
Change your mind about something significant every day.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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
Image
Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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
Image
Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
In a country that never wins anything: in Canada, if one of our athletes so much as makes the final in a World Championship, we declare a national holiday.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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
Image
Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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