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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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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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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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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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Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.
Malcolm Gladwell
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..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is - is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell
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I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?
Malcolm Gladwell
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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
Malcolm Gladwell
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The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Malcolm Gladwell
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If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.
Malcolm Gladwell
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An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
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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Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.
Malcolm Gladwell
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You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.
Malcolm Gladwell
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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.
Malcolm Gladwell