Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

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.

If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can’t need social approval to go forward.

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.

But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country — and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even

The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.

"If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand-things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability," says Anderson. "For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, the not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And Blue's Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve."

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

To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.

The conviction that we know others better than they know us — and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa) — leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

It was an admission of defeat. ... He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how. He couldn't even talk to his calculus teacher, for goodness' sake. These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one — not even rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.

the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

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.

"Why are man hole covers around?" If you don't knwo the answer to the questions, you're not smart enough to work at microsoft

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.

The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.