Malcolm Gladwell
Emotion is contagious.Collection: Success
Outlier are those who have been given opportunities-- -and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.Collection: Opportunity
Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.Collection: Success
Occasions when you can change your mind should be cherished, because they mean you're smarter than you were before.Collection: Mean
We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.Collection: Needs
Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making - it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.Collection: Thinking
Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.Collection: Absence
Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.Collection: Assessment
The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.Collection: Children
Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.Collection: Reading
If your parents are billionaires, that might actually be an obstacle to your own happiness and self-development. If you go to Oxford or Harvard, that might actually thwart your desire to graduate with a science or math degree.Collection: Math
There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.Collection: Simple
There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Success
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?Collection: Children
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.Collection: Success
There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.Collection: Epidemics
Working really hard is what successful people do.Collection: Successful
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.Collection: Views
The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Beer
...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)Collection: Hard Work
You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.Collection: Stories
People who are busy doing things – as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don’t have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.Collection: Reading
Re-reading is much underrated. I’ve read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.Collection: Reading