Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, CMis an English-born Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Outliers: The Story of Success, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, a collection of his journalism, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. All five books were...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 September 1963
CountryCanada
What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.
Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They'd have nothing to blog about.
Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.
Instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop.
The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
Success is not a function of individual talent. It's the steady accumulation of advantages. It's bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors.
Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.
I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.
Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.
An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.
What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control.
Arousal leaves us mind-blind.
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.