785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

In Steiger’s case, of course, his high connectedness is a function of his versatility as an actor and, in all likelihood, some degree of good luck. But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.

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.

Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.

We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.

That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.

I think that the task of figuring out how to combine the best of conscious deliberation and instinctive judgment is one of the great challenges of our time.

It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And.

When you write down your thoughts, your chances of having the flash of insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly impaired.