Malcolm Gladwell
I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?Collection: Phones
It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.Collection: Sports
My highest compliment is when someone comes up to me to say, "My 14-year-old daughter, or my 12-year-old son read your book and loved it." I cannot conceive of a greater compliment than that - to write something that as an adult I find satisfying, but also that manages to reach a curious 13- or 14-year-old.Collection: Daughter
The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.Collection: Differences
There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.Collection: Thoughtful
The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances.Collection: Real
the 10,000hr rule is a definite key in successCollection: Keys
One of the things I think the police have to do is to stop behaving like armies.Collection: Army
A fan is always an outsider. Most sportswriters are not, by this definition, fans. They capitalize on access to athletes. They spoke to Kobe last night, and Kobe says his finger is going to be fine. They spent three days fly-fishing with Brett Favre in March, and Brett says he's definitely coming back for another season.Collection: Athlete
Why are man hole covers around?" If you don't knwo the answer to the questions, you're not smart enough to work at microsoftCollection: Smart
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.Collection: Motivational
As a writer, I know that - you write a first draft and then put it in a drawer. The longer I can put it in a drawer, the better off I am. So I structure my writing so that things can sit.Collection: Writing
All artists have to do that at a certain point. This shift that has to happen between the initial moment of creation and then the consideration of what has been created.Collection: Artist
Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.Collection: Block
By shifting the balance away from the individual we open the door for the individual. Because we make it obvious that anyone can do it given the right circumstance.Collection: Doors
The iPod is clearly a tipping point (and I'm not quite sure it is a wholly positive development), because it is a revolution in the way that we consume creative property, which I would call art. It has radically changed the relationship between the artist and the audience, how money changes hands, and how much money changes hands. Music was the first, and books are coming next. The Kindle or some form of electronic book is clearly inevitable, and it will massively reshape how books are sold, who pays for them, and how they're consumed. It is going to be really fascinating.Collection: Art
Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. This is the critical lesson of improve, too, and it is also a key to understanding a puzzle of Millennium Challenge: spontaneity isn't random.Collection: Basketball
I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.Collection: Book
What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.Collection: Two
The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.Collection: Small Changes
We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try.Collection: Inspirational
Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Baseball
The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control.Collection: Mean
Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.Collection: Change
Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.Collection: Running
There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.Collection: Thinking
...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.Collection: Thinking
extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress.Collection: Stress
The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.Collection: Pain
Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.Collection: Overcoming
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.Collection: Entrepreneur
Visionaries are limited by their visions.Collection: Vision
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.Collection: People
When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.Collection: Experts
Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.Collection: Poverty
The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.Collection: Children
When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.Collection: Cheating
What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.Collection: Moving
I don't want to be like the angry old guy in the corner who is always ranting and raving about the same things - but I don't mind doing that just a little bit!Collection: Guy
There is nothing more common than critics of journalists accusing them of practicing journalism. It is our function in the world to take things that are complicated and render them in a form that non-experts can follow and make sense of.Collection: World
Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.Collection: Our World
Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?Collection: Sports
The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.Collection: Moving
Jenny Simpson loses her shoe in the women's fifteen hundred, with a lap and a half to go, destroying her chances to repeat as world champion, and she gives the most gracious interview afterward about how she's had a wonderful career already. Great for Jenny Simpson. Bad for the sport! We need drama!Collection: Sports
It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research.Collection: Different
When I see someone who reads something of mine and draws something out of it that's very different from my perspective, I think that's actually cool. Sometimes it's worrisome when you feel they badly misinterpret it, but it just says that they're thinking, and they're bringing their own interpretation to bear on it. [...] That's part of the wonderful thing about putting words into the world, and if I was worried about that, I couldn't be a writer.Collection: Thinking
I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.Collection: Opportunity
People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.Collection: Fate