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
My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.
I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.
I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.
As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.
There's this powerful phrase in the legal world, "Difficult cases make bad law." The exception is the difficult case. You can't generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don't solve any problem because they're so one of a kind.
The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.
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.
The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence." To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.
I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.
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
The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances.
...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)
Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.
An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.