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The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person.By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
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Rock
Hundredth
Time
Rocks
Throws
People
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More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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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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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.
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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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There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.
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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
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If there is one thing I learned by reading Epstein's The Sports Gene it is that world-class athletes are, by definition, abnormal: that is, the kind of person capable of competing at that level is necessarily very different from the rest of us physiologically. They are outliers.
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What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.
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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.
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Activism that challenges the status quo, that attacks deeply rooted problems, is not for the faint of heart.
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You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.
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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.
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The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.
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Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
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You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.
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That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
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Jenny Simpson loses her shoe in the women's fifteen hundred, with a lap and a half to go, destroying her chances to repeat as world champion, and she gives the most gracious interview afterward about how she's had a wonderful career already. Great for Jenny Simpson. Bad for the sport! We need drama!
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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 have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.
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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.
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Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?
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