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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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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Incompetence
Expertise
Certainty
Absence
Presence

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - The Sports Gene - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an all-star challenge on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decat
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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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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understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Trump is an innovator who has shown how out of step the political establishment was. Which I think, probably, in the long term will be healthy. We have to figure out how to reinvigorate our political institutions and he's demonstrating to us the urgency of that task.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.
Malcolm Gladwell
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A fan is always an outsider. Most sportswriters are not, by this definition, fans. They capitalize on access to athletes. They spoke to Kobe last night, and Kobe says his finger is going to be fine. They spent three days fly-fishing with Brett Favre in March, and Brett says he's definitely coming back for another season.
Malcolm Gladwell
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People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.
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 people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
Malcolm Gladwell
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A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
Malcolm Gladwell
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To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.
Malcolm Gladwell
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You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.
Malcolm Gladwell
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My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Activism that challenges the status quo, that attacks deeply rooted problems, is not for the faint of heart.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.
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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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.
Malcolm Gladwell