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When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Otherwise
Trying
Things
Never
Would
Attempted
Underdog
Forced

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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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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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Every cop will tell you that their real job is being a social worker. That's what they do all day. The large majority of police officers in this country never even draw their gun, let alone fire it. They do conflict resolution, right? And if that's their job, why do they need to look like they're an occupying force?
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Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.
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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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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.
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People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.
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We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
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People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.
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A fan is always an outsider. Most sportswriters are not, by this definition, fans. They capitalize on access to athletes. They spoke to Kobe last night, and Kobe says his finger is going to be fine. They spent three days fly-fishing with Brett Favre in March, and Brett says he's definitely coming back for another season.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.
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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 worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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