Malcolm Gladwell Quotes & Wisdom
"Author of Great Books" |
“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.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes & Wisdom- If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires." -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes & Wisdom- “Achievement is talent plus preparation” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes & Wisdom- |
Malcolm Gladwell Recommended Books
Malcolm Gladwell Quotes About Success
“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success-
“Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success-
“Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success-
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success-
“Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success-
“Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success-
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“The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “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.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Those three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Working really hard is what successful people do...” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “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.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “the 10,000hr rule is a definite key in success -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success-
“[Greenberg] knew that cultural legacies matter--that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn't assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their heritage that did not suit the aviation world, they could change.”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? "Mary got a quarter," Friedman says. "There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket." ... and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professionals.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The music critic Harold Schonberg goes further: Mozart, he argues, actually “developed late,” since he didn’t produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than twenty years.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The “IQ fundamentalist” Arthur Jensen put it thusly in his 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (p. 113): “The four socially and personally most important threshold regions on the IQ scale are those that differentiate with high probability between persons who, because of their level of general mental ability, can or cannot attend a regular school (about IQ 50), can or cannot master the traditional subject matter of elementary school (about IQ 75), can or cannot succeed in the academic or college preparatory curriculum through high school (about IQ 105), can or cannot graduate from an accredited four-year college with grades that would qualify for admission to a professional or graduate school (about IQ 115). Beyond this, the IQ level becomes relatively unimportant in terms of ordinary occupational aspirations and criteria of success. That is not to say that there are not real differences between the intellectual capabilities represented by IQs of 115 and 150 or even between IQs of 150 and 180. But IQ differences in this upper part of the scale have far less personal implications than the thresholds just described and are generally of lesser importance for success in the popular sense than are certain traits of personality and character.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Working really hard is what successful people do.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The As were judged to be much more alert, poised, attractive, and well dressed. In fact, the scores on those four dimensions are so different as to make you think you are looking at two different species of humans. You aren’t, of course. You’re simply seeing the difference between those schooled by their families to present their best face to the world, and those denied that experience.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief: they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over the course of the Computer Center’s life, thousands of students passed” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “A hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “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.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- What are we seeing here? One very real possibility is that these are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting styles that we talked about in the Chris Langan chapter. Think back to Alex Williams, the nine-year-old whom Annette Lareau studied.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “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 maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical in nature: that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “concerted cultivation. He gets taken to museums and gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp, where he takes classes. When he’s bored at home, there are plenty of books to read, and his parents see it as their responsibility to keep him actively engaged in the world around him. It’s not hard to see how Alex would get better at reading and math over the summer.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Those born in the last quarter of the year might as well give up on hockey too.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “I think overall it’s a disadvantage,” Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “though, will improve her math and reading skills, and every carefree summer day she spends puts her further and further behind Alex. Alex isn’t necessarily smarter than Katie. He’s just out-learning her: he’s putting in a few solid months of learning during the summer while she watches television and plays outside. What Alexander’s work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “the national team tryouts, the Czech soccer coaches might as well have told everyone born after midsummer that.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- |
“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.”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig. (150)” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “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.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by 'we' I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger role preparation seems to play.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success-
“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.”
-Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can't easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “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.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “No one-not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savvy is knowledge. It's a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “general intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups--and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand ... you have to go back to the past ... it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “[Chris Langan] told me not long ago. "I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamt the answer and I can remember it. Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “He was maxed out. He had no resources left to do anything else. That's what happens when you're tired. Your decision-making skills erode. You start missing things—things that you would pick up on any other day.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Western communication has what linguists call a "transmitter orientation"--that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. ...within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Working really hard is what successful people do, and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “[Practical intelligence is] practical in nature: that is, it's now knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “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.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “When we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success--then ... We have a way to successes out of the unsucessful.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “The futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “I mean, it’s ridiculous,” Dhuey says. “It’s outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- “To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten years? Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” -Malcolm Gladwell Quotes about success- |
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