Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

Achievement is talent plus preparation.

For half the young men, that was it. They were the control group. For the other half, there was a catch. As they walked down the hallway with their questionnaire, a man — a confederate of the experimenters — walked past them and pulled out a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. The already narrow hallway now became even narrower. As the young men tried to squeeze by, the confederate looked up, annoyed. He slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut, jostled the young men with his shoulder, and, in a low but audible voice, said the trigger word: “Asshole.” Cohen and Nisbett wanted to measure, as precisely as possible, what being called that word meant. They looked at the faces of their subjects and rated how much anger they saw. They shook the young men’s hands to see if their grip was firmer than usual. They took saliva samples from the students, both before and after the insult, to see if being called an asshole caused their levels of testosterone and cortisol — the hormones that drive arousal and aggression — to go up. Finally they asked the students to read the following story and supply a conclusion: It had only been about twenty minutes since they had arrived at the party when Jill pulled Steve aside, obviously bothered about something. “What’s wrong?” asked Steve. “It’s Larry. I mean, he knows that you and I are engaged, but he’s already made two passes at me tonight.” Jill walked back into the crowd, and Steve decided to keep his eye on Larry. Sure enough, within five minutes, Larry was reaching over and trying to kiss Jill. If you’ve been insulted, are you more likely to imagine Steve doing something violent to Larry?

Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.

Somewhere in retirement, Haywood Hansell saw that announcement in the newspaper, and I’m sure he wondered why he didn’t get an award as well for the effort he put toward fighting a war with as few civilian casualties as possible. But we don’t give prizes to people who fail at their given tasks, no matter how noble their intentions, do we? To the victor go the spoils.

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.

If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way - who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites - it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk to a member of a minority, you aren't betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.

...legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice — that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another.

Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.

The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called — appropriately enough — the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities. Students who would be at the top of their class at a good school can easily fall to the bottom of a really good school. Students who would feel that they have mastered a subject at a good school can have the feeling that they are falling farther and farther behind in a really good school. And that feeling — as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be — matters. 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.

Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions.

"The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. "Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people," Spokane told me. "When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another." The Hutterites, obviously, didn't get this idea from contemporary evolutionary psychology. They've been following the 150 rule for centuries. But their rationale fits perfectly with Dunbar's theories. At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens-something indefinable but very real-that somehow changes the nature of community overnight. "In smaller groups people are a lot closer. They're knit together, which is very important if you want to be be effective and successful at community life," Gross said. "If you get too large, you don't have enough work in common. You don't have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost." Gross spoke from experience. He had been in Hutterite colonies that had come near to that magic number and seen firsthand how things had changed. "What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan." He made a gesture with his hands, as if to demonstrate division. "You get two or three groups within the larger group. That is something you really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to branch out.

Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things that make for being a good parent.