Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I'm guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that's worth more to most of us than money.

In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.

It's the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing. It's judgment And what Blink is — what all the stories and studies and arguments add up to — is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.

Numerous studies of human cognition have come to parallel conclusions: the human brain can divide random stimuli into about six or seven different categories. For example, the average person can distinguish between about six different musical notes before getting confused.

Graham states, "Because average country income levels do not matter to happiness, but relative distances from the average do, the poor Honduran is happier because their distance from mean income is smaller." And in Honduras, the poor are much closer in wealth to the middle class than the poor are in Chile, so they feel better off.

From experience we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively, in the moment. But — and this is one of the lessons I tried very hard to impart in Blink — it is easy to disrupt this gift.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. "Put people into two categories," Schwartz says. "Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once

But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, or being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

If more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison, Clear concluded, the effect on crime starts to reverse.

The more you invest in a set of beliefs - the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction - the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don't give up. You double down. As Festinger recalled in an oral history, One of the things we expected would happen would be that, after the disconfirmation of this prediction...they would...have to discard their belief, but to the extent that they were committed to it, this would be difficult to do.

the day when a 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 dawn of the personal computer age, then who would

elders.' " Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting UNIX, which was a software system

Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation." It's an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to

I think that the task of figuring out how to combine the best of conscious deliberation and instinctive judgment is one of the great challenges of our time.

The truth is that we are drawn to the Niederhoffers of this world because we are all, at heart, like Niederhoffer: we associate the willingness to risk great failure — and the ability to climb back from catastrophe — with courage. But in this we are wrong.

There they are, the professor and the prodigy, and what they prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In fact -- and this is the most heartbreaking part of all -- he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor. The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.

Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school.

could, however. When we say that people like Langan are

it is when thus relieved from the state of tension belonging to actual study that boys and girls, as well as men and women, acquire the habit of thought and reflection, and of forming their own conclusions, independently of what they are taught and the authority of others.

in the snake pit. (Officially, it was called the counting room.) Lawyers for each side met with inspectors of elections

and unruly. Adversaries were sometimes in T-shirts, eating watermelon or sharing a bottle of scotch. In rare cases

Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener's eye that tells you you're on to something.

6. Before the Memorial Cup final, Gord Wasden—the father of one of the Medicine Hat Tigers—stood by the side of the ice, talking about his son Scott. He was wearing a Medicine Hat baseball cap and a black Medicine Hat T-shirt. "When he was four and five years old," Wasden