Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success. What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they're like—what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top.

But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.

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

They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn't starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn't have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings.

The paradox of talking to strangers: we need to talk to them. But we're terrible at it (p. 166).

Maybe when a woman shows up in a courtroom wearing a niqab, the correct response isn't to dismiss her case—it's to require that everyone wear a veil

To become a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity, because the deep respect for authority that runs throughout Korean culture simply does not work in the cockpit.

Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation.

We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. 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.

the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over the course of the Computer Center's life, thousands of students passed

movie 2001: A Space Odyssey." Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines—what passed in those days for computer terminals.

That's like being a hockey player born on January I.

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

Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it.

computer would come along that was small and inexpensive enough for an ordinary person to use and own. That day had finally arrived. If January 1975 was the

this is the assumption of transparency in action. 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.

Korean hierarchy: formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain.

that "television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movement of the television viewers' heads

No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.?

a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse.

The fatalism of Russian peasant proverbs is contrasted with the self-reliance of Chinese ones by

Uno de los principales motivos por los que un catedrático acepta un sueldo inferior al que podría cobrar en la empresa privada es que la vida universitaria le da la libertad de hacer lo que quiera hacer, lo que considere correcto.

whenever he goes to the doctor's office is that forty cents of every health-care dollar goes to either fraud or waste.

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 particular place in history presents us with.