Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

neighborhood was filled with engineers from Hewlett-Packard, then as now one of

manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which

our notion that it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much too simplistic.

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.

Dis am life; some go up and some go down.

When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues, this is in large part what we mean. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he's wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because—and perhaps this is even more critical—the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.

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

that extra practice under his belt, he really is better, so he's the one more likely to make it to

From experience, we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively, in the moment.

It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And

any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we're being deferential to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, you

The Matthew Effect "FOR UNTO EVERYONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN, AND HE SHALL HAVE ABUNDANCE. BUT FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT SHALL BE TAKEN AWAY EVEN THAT WHICH HE

What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.

Paul Revere's ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms. Not all word-of-mouth epidemics are this sensational, of course. But it is safe to say that word of mouth is-even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns-still the most important form of human communication

The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.

The beginning is hard, [Levin] went on. By the end of the day they're restless. Part of it is endurance, part of it is motivation. Part of it is incentives and rewards and fun stuff. Part of it is good old-fashion discipline. You throw all of that into the stew. We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean.

But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don't choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse.

By no stretch of the imagination or of standards of genius," Sorokin concluded, "is the 'gifted group' as a whole 'gifted.' " By the time Terman came out with his fourth volume of Genetic Studies of Genius, the word "genius" had all but vanished. "We have seen," Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, "that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

A typical five-year-old consumes about 60 percent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control.

Sometimes we're better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us

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

In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness.

Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.

manuscript. Happily, they complied, and Outliers is infinitely