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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
Takes
Talk
Place
Happens
Two
Persuasion
Really
Context
People
Basic
Question

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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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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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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.
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Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs.
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The difference isn't resources, it's attitude.
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The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.
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People are experience-rich and theory-poor.
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Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.
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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.
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Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
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Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.
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We are approaching levels - if we're not beyond levels - of threshold for the number of messages that consumers can take in in a given day. There is a kind of hunger for some kind of new approach to getting the word out about something.
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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.
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I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.
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The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
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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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The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.
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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.
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I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
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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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