Malcolm Gladwell Quotes
Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.
The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
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.
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.
Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
Experience is a job we do for free, and it hurts.
What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations they had for their own lives.
The highest achievers in any field don’t consider themselves masters of their domain.
Extraordinary people are the ones who can listen to the world and re-imagine it.
The first lesson of Blink is that the power of thinking without thinking is not a gift but a mental process that we can all learn to cultivate.
We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility.
We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.
Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
I suspect that what makes a Malcolm Gladwell book is an idea that is surprising, but also something that you feel is common and important.
We don’t so much solve problems as outgrow them.
Efficiency innovations are attempts to do more with less by minimizing inputs, but a disruptive innovation causes us to do things differently by introducing a new set of values.
We have this idea that if we want to succeed, we need to be focused. But it’s exactly the opposite.
Success is not just about individual talent and effort. It’s also about what we inherit from our family, culture, and society.
Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave, it’s what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
There is something profoundly tragic about what we gain and what we lose as we age.
We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off.
In the act of reaching out, we become something more than what we were before.
The issue of how jobs are defined is a crucial one.
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.
Reinvention is the essence of American culture.
Success is not about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about being the person who gets the most out of the room.
The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
The world we could have is so much richer than the world we have settled for.
We need to be open to the idea that we are capable of change, of growth, and of progress.
It is not the brightest who succeed. It is the relentless, the ones who refuse to give up.
The story of success is more complex than it appears.
Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.
Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible.
The sense that children have not yet grown into their final form can lend them a special insight.
To be a great leader requires tremendous self-confidence, but it also requires humility and a willingness to listen.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we judge people’s abilities based on appearances.
The people at the top don’t just work harder or have more innate talent, they also have more opportunities to succeed.
There is a tendency in our society to discount the value of practice. The secret to being good at anything is actually quite simple: practice.
Success is not a solo act. It is a group effort.
There are limits to what can be accomplished by a small group or a single individual, no matter how talented they may be.
Success is about being in the right place at the right time, but it’s also about having the courage to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way.
Our happiness depends on the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.
Disruptive innovation is not about making things slightly better, it’s about reimagining what’s possible.
To achieve greatness, we must be willing to challenge conventional wisdom and embrace new ways of thinking.
Our actions are not as conscious or deliberate as we would like to believe. Much of what we do is driven by unconscious biases and habits.
The key to success is not just hard work, but also seizing the right opportunities when they arise.
It’s not enough to be smart or talented. To truly succeed, you must also be willing to put in the necessary effort and take risks.