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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
Things
Open
Think
Success
Thinking
Idea
Ideas
Publish
Book
Fountain
Many
Arbitrary
Great
Forty
Much
Nine

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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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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.
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That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
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Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
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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.
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Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.
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When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.
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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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Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.
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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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Change your mind about something significant every day.
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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.
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Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.
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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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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.
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A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.
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Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.
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When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.
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You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
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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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