Malcolm Gladwell
The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.Collection: Anger
You don't train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly people who want to help others optimize their physical and psychological health, and then have them run a claims-processing operation for insurance companies.Collection: Medical
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.Collection: Imagination
The underdog winning is the romantic position.Collection: Romantic
The most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly.Collection: Famous
If Harvard is $60,000 and University of Toronto, where I went to school, is maybe six. So you're really telling me that education is 10 times better at Harvard than it is at University of Toronto? That seems ridiculous to me.Collection: Education
The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.Collection: Fear
I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.Collection: Medical
Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.Collection: Technology
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.
Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.
We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day.
What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't 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.
An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community.
People assume when my hair is long that I am a lot cooler than I actually am. I am not opposed to this misconception, by the way, but it is a misconception.
A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.
Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.
From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.
I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augmenting story-telling.
Shallow communities are relatively easy to build.
It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.
Do you remember the wrestler Andre the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly.
Take the great example of the four-minute mile. One guy breaks it, then all of a sudden everyone breaks it. And they break it in such a short period of time that it can't be because they were training harder. It's purely that it was a psychological barrier, and someone had to show them that they could do it.
It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
If you're last in your class at Harvard, it doesn't feel like you're a good student, even though you really are. It's not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school.
The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles - a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles.
In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery.
If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.
The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as 'steroids.'
An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.
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?
You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.
So, it's a very, you know - maybe we're wrong in - you know, we go around thinking the innovator is the person who's first to kind of conceive of something. And maybe the innovation process continues down the line to the second and the third and the fourth entrant into a field.
Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.
There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.
We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.
My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.
You think it matters to the kids whether they're learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano?
We should be firing bad teachers.
The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.
If you're skinny and you can't play hockey in Canada, you aren't left with a lot of options. I was left with running.
Age-class running, as you know, is completely unreliable. It's based on this artificial thing, which is that people who are the same age have the same level of physical maturity. Which just isn't true.
I never had those dreams of making the Olympics. Never.
When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.
I'm just trying to say that it should reassure us that the inevitable traumas of being human do end up producing some good. Otherwise, the human condition is overwhelmingly depressing.
We used to say poor people had lousy genes. Then we decided that wasn't OK, but we transferred the prejudice to upbringing. We said, 'You were neglected as a child, so you'll never make it.' That's just as pernicious.