Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

The more you invest in a set of beliefs — the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction — the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.

the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point,

How you feel about your abilities — your academic “self-concept” — in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.

People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.

... they were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.

All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.

We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to. Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose.

We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience

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?

They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act — and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment — are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation

The people at the top don't just work harder. They work much, much harder.

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.

. . . it is not possible to staff a large company without short people. There simply aren't enough tall people to go around.