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There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Years
Explained
Thoughtful
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Idea
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Ideas

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
Malcolm Gladwell
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When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
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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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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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
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[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.
Malcolm Gladwell
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There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day.
Malcolm Gladwell
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You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
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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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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Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.
Malcolm Gladwell
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What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
Malcolm Gladwell
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What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.
Malcolm Gladwell