Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

And everyone knows that it's better to have an expert show you — and not just tell you — how to play tennis or golf or a musical instrument. We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instructions.

How good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger.

We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.

Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.

The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful.

If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.

But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.

Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.

We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t.

We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

When you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger — because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.

Harlan that allowed them to reproduce in the New World the culture of honor they had created in the Old World. “To the first settlers, the American backcountry was a dangerous environment, just as the British borderlands had been,” the historian David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed. Much of the southern highlands were “debatable lands” in the border sense of a contested territory without established government or the rule of law. The borderers were more at home

And Leites and Wolf were wrong. “It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,

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.

Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

If you knew my father, you would have seen him in other stressful situations, and you would have come to understand that the “frightened” face, for whatever reason, was simply not part of his repertoire. In crisis, he turned deadly calm. But if you didn’t know him, what would you have thought? Would you have concluded that he was cold? Unfeeling? When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea — a stereotype — for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often.

This is the gift of training and expertise — the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.

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.

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

We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is — and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine-and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.

These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles — these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize — are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

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.