Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

“We dont know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we dont always appreciate their fragility.”

“Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, On what basis am I making a judgment? ... If you have no experience, then your instincts arent any good.”

“What do we tell our children? ... Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Dont judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.”

“That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.”

“If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.”

“I suspect people who are indecisive are people who are far too enamored of analysis in all settings and are destroying their ability to make an instinctive judgment through over-analysis and thats dangerous,”

“the single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.”

“Its the boiling point. Its the moment when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.”

“PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor. People who are busy doing things ? as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops ? dont have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.”

“It made me realize that Id changed what I thought was a trivial aspect of who I was but it profoundly made a difference in the way the world perceived me. That was when I thought it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.”

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Its not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesnt.

The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘naturals,’ musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any ‘grinds,’ people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. The idea that excellence at a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of excellence. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

Hard world is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean

. . . Im not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isnt possible, and, as well explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute conviction, Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision, psychologist Joshua Aronson says. But how on earth could she know that? What my [and others] research . . . show[s] is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say I dont know more often.

Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.

A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.