Quote

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

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
Things
Never
Would
Attempted
Underdog
Forced
Otherwise
Trying

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

Image
So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.
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 entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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
Image
Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
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
An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
Jenny Simpson loses her shoe in the women's fifteen hundred, with a lap and a half to go, destroying her chances to repeat as world champion, and she gives the most gracious interview afterward about how she's had a wonderful career already. Great for Jenny Simpson. Bad for the sport! We need drama!
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
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
Image
People at CDC [Centers for Disease Control] who cut their teeth on diseases over the last 10 years have started to think of crime as another disease, and using some of these same concepts. It was something that was in the air in that world, but it was time to bust it out and apply it to any number of different social epidemics.
Malcolm Gladwell
Image
It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
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