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Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Acquaintances
Acquaintance
Represent
Source
Powerful
Social
Power

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People don't rise from nothing.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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
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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
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The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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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Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.
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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Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas.
Malcolm Gladwell
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When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The religious paradigm and the science fiction paradigm are different. Apologies to science fiction fans, but the paradigm there is to create a new world and describe it with a kind of specificity that we describe the world we inhabit. Religiosity, on the other hand, does none of that.
Malcolm Gladwell