785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. “Put people into two categories,” Schwartz says. “Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected.

Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.

They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself.

The deceptions of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff, the confusion over Amanda Knox, the plights of Graham Spanier and Emily Doe are all evidence of the underlying problem we have in making sense of people we do not know. Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do?

Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States.

The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.

It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.

Paul Revere’s ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms. Not all word-of-mouth epidemics are this sensational, of course. But it is safe to say that word of mouth is-even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns-still the most important form of human communication.

In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. 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.