Quote

The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Underdog
Opportunity
Seemed
Enlightening
Often
Fail
Unthinkable
Facts
Changes
Opens
Might
Appreciate
Permit
Way
Failing
Things
Doors
Creates
Enlightens
People
Ways
Opportunities
Permits
Fact
Otherwise

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The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.
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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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David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - The Sports Gene - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an all-star challenge on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decat
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What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.
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Emotion is contagious.
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If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
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The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
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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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There are lots of issues more important than where billionaires donate their money.
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I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.
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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.
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Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
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We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.
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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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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!
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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.
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The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.
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if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition
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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)
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