Malcolm Gladwell
Change your mind about something significant every day.Collection: Mind
The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.Collection: Success
Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.Collection: Expertise
Sometimes the most modest changes can bring about enormous effects.Collection: Sometimes
The successful are those who have been given opportunities.Collection: Successful
You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?Collection: Thinking
People are experience-rich and theory-poor.Collection: People
Nobody accomplishes success by themselves.Collection: Accomplish
A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.Collection: Challenges
The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.Collection: Basketball
The difference isn't resources, it's attitude.Collection: Attitude
People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.Collection: People
We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by 'we' I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't.Collection: Mean
Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.Collection: Exercise
The Law of the Few... says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger.Collection: Epidemics
If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too.Collection: Play
We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.Collection: Writing
Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.Collection: Years
The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.Collection: Opportunity
In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.Collection: Order
An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.Collection: Important
Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.Collection: Ideas
I think that persistence and stubbornness and hard work are probably, at the end of the day, more important than the willingness to take a risk.Collection: Hard Work
There are some people, who I'll charitably call snobs, who are dismissive of any conversation that doesn't begin with the full level of complexity. That's just not how the world works.Collection: People
Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.Collection: Looks
If you're in business it's both a promise and a warning. It says that sometimes little things can cause some little guy to have an overnight success.Collection: Guy
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.Collection: Successful
Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.Collection: Character
I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.Collection: Book
Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions... by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.Collection: Mean
People don't rise from nothing.Collection: People
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.Collection: Success
The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.Collection: Epidemics
If people disobey, don't ask what is wrong with them, ask what's wrong with their leaders.Collection: People
I became convinced that knowing lots of people was kind of skill, something that the diligent can overcome.Collection: Skills
Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.Collection: Thinking
People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.Collection: Two
Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!Collection: Knows
That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.Collection: Philosophy
Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.Collection: Adversity
When people reflexively write checks to institutions that have billions of dollars in the bank, they are essentially committing a moral crime. Your money could do good in this world and you're choosing instead to waste it. People have to do a better job of that. You've got to find places where your money's going to do some good and direct your dollars towards that institution.Collection: Writing
My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.Collection: Children
Our intuitions, as humans, aren't always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.Collection: Confusing
I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.Collection: Moving
When crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars - we're surprised. I'm saying, don't be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work.Collection: New York
I'm necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I'm still a parasite.Collection: Done
I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.Collection: Track
I always resist seeing my own personal motivation in my work, but I guess it must be there on some level. And I do feel very much that my life follows the kinds of things I talk about in my books. I've always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level.Collection: Motivation
The sad thing about doping is how much it obscures our appreciation of greatness.Collection: Appreciation