Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

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.

Don't get me wrong. I love my mother-in-law. It's her daughter I can't figure out.

second lesson of Blink. Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn't seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. We can prevent the people fighting wars or staffing emergency rooms or policing the streets from making mistakes.

What was the difference between the As and the Cs? Terman ran through every conceivable explanation. He looked at their physical and mental health, their "masculinity-femininity scores," and their hobbies and vocational interests. He compared the ages when they started walking and talking and what their precise IQ scores were in elementary and high school. In the end, only one thing mattered: family background.

There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals

way the world of classical music picks its future virtuosos, or the way the world of ballet picks its future ballerinas, or the way our elite educational system picks its future scientists and intellectuals. You can't buy your way into Major Junior A hockey. It doesn't matter who your father or mother is, or who your grandfather was, or what business your family is in. Nor does it matter

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.

We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is—contrary to all our expectations—a certainty.

What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. That is why a marriage can be read and decoded so easily, because some key part of human activity — whether it is something as simple as pounding out a Morse code message or as complex as being married to someone — has an identifiable and stable pattern. Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse code operators, is pattern recognition.

You may have noticed that I called the Dijksterguis study a partial answer to the question of when to draw on our instincts and when to rely on conscious analysis. The truth it that this is not a question that I - or anyone else, for that matter - can answer definitively. It's just too complicated. The best we can do, I think, is try to puzzle out the right mix of conscious and unconscious analysis on a case-by-base basis.

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good

For the unhappy," Alvarez wrote, "Christmas is always a bad time: the terrible false jollity that comes at you from every side, braying about goodwill and peace and family fun, makes loneliness and depression particularly hard to bear.

Some of them may have children in nearby schools, and grocery stores where they shop, and friends they like to be close to, and parents they need to look in on—and as a result have all kinds of reasons not to move their business. Their job, at that moment, is sex work. But they are mothers and daughters and friends and citizens first. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.

success follows a predictable course.

Our liberties are imperiled by overly competent beaurocrats.

Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge only at that given moment.

higher. If everyone on Wall Street behaved like Harry Markopolos, there would be no fraud on Wall Street—but the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall Street.1

The officers weren't parked on a street corner, eating doughnuts. They were in constant motion. Police officers are no different from the rest of us. They want to feel that their efforts are important, that what they do matters, that their hard work will be rewarded. What happened in District 144 provided exactly what the profession of law enforcement had been searching for: validation.

They were "Scotch-Irish"—that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern counties of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland. The borderlands—as this region was known—were remote and lawless territories that had been fought over for hundreds of years. The people of the region were steeped in violence.

that power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.

nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.

And what was the principal implication of coupling? That law enforcement didn't need to be bigger; it needed to be more focused. If criminals operated overwhelmingly in a few concentrated hot spots, those crucial parts of the city should be more heavily policed than anywhere else, and the kinds of crime-fighting strategies used by police in those areas ought to be very different from those used in the vast stretches of the city with virtually no crime at all.

Se você está julgando se alguém é bom violinista, saber se essa pessoa é alta ou baixa, bonita ou feia, branca ou negra não vai ajudar. Na verdade, provavelmente apenas adicionará preconceitos que dificultarão ainda mais sua tarefa.

It would be easier to accept that version of events, however, if we hadn't just looked at hockey and soccer players. Theirs was supposed to be a pure meritocracy as well. Only it wasn't. It was a story of how the outliers in a particular field reached their lofty status through