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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.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Thinking
Idea
Ideas
Publish
Book
Fountain
Many
Arbitrary
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Forty
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Nine
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Success

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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Have you ever wondered... how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists... but the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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There is nothing more common than critics of journalists accusing them of practicing journalism. It is our function in the world to take things that are complicated and render them in a form that non-experts can follow and make sense of.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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)
Malcolm Gladwell
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The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
Malcolm Gladwell
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To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what's ten years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.
Malcolm Gladwell
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There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.
Malcolm Gladwell
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When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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Emotion is contagious.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.
Malcolm Gladwell
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I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.
Malcolm Gladwell
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It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience experience leads to proficiency and the more proficient you are the more valuable you'll be.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.
Malcolm Gladwell