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I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Phones
Picture
Point
Embarrassing
Phone

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
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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As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.
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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Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.
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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Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.
Malcolm Gladwell
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There’s this powerful phrase in the legal world, “Difficult cases make bad law.” The exception is the difficult case. You can’t generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don’t solve any problem because they’re so one of a kind.
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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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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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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We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
Malcolm Gladwell
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In a country that never wins anything: in Canada, if one of our athletes so much as makes the final in a World Championship, we declare a national holiday.
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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I have a new way of doing things, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.
Malcolm Gladwell
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So the first task of a police force is not to fight crime and enforce the law. It is to establish legitimacy with the law-abiding citizenry and then fight crime and enforce the law.
Malcolm Gladwell
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If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.
Malcolm Gladwell