Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

Achievement is talent plus preparation

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

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.

Emotion is contagious.

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.

The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.

Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.

If you're in business it's both a promise and a warning. It says that sometimes little things can cause some little guy to have an overnight success.

..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.

In my mid-adolescence, my friend Terry Martin and I became obsessed with William F. Buckley. This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization. Buckley seemed impossibly exotic.

The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.

The underdog winning is the romantic position.

Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.

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.

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.

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.

You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

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.

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.

Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.