785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing. It’s judgment And what Blink is – what all the stories and studies and arguments add up to – is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grades, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.

Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.

Cultural legacies matter, and once we’ve seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first century intellectual tasks.

It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.

The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.

What is an outlier?

George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.