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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.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Place
Happens
Two
Persuasion
Really
Context
People
Basic
Question
Takes
Talk

More quotes by 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.
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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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I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.
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People don't rise from nothing.
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People at CDC [Centers for Disease Control] who cut their teeth on diseases over the last 10 years have started to think of crime as another disease, and using some of these same concepts. It was something that was in the air in that world, but it was time to bust it out and apply it to any number of different social epidemics.
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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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A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
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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.
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Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.
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It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
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It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.
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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.
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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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My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.
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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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I have a new way of doing things, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.
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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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Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.
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