Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

this wasn't about something really obvious, such as skin color or age or height or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist.

Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine.

n good decision making, frugality matters; take a complex problem and reduce it to its simplest elements.

Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot.

Here was the downside to Shirley Polykoff's world. You could get what you wanted by faking it, but then you would never know whether it was you or the bit of fakery that made the difference.

The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand

Her idea was that you should be whatever you want to be, including being a blonde.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions — we can alter the way we thin-slice — by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They gathered together the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as

She who was the heart And hinge of all our learnings and our loves: She left us destitute and, as we might, Trooping together.

practical intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present.

the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate:

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger's behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.

The critical thing about Mavens, though, is that they aren't passive collectors of information. It isn't just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. "A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests

We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

think we get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted—when we can't edit, or we don't know what to edit, or our environment doesn't let us edit.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

Even in his discussion of Harvard, it's as if Langan has no conception of the culture and particulars of the institution he's talking about. When you accept a paycheck from these people, it is going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what the man says you can do to receive another paycheck. What?

The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.

If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.

But it is an advance that has nothing to do with taking more pictures, or taking better pictures. It has to do with going beyond the picture.

We knew that our minority students, a lot of them, were doing well," says Richard Lempert, one of the authors of the Michigan study. "I think our expectation was that we would find a half- or two-thirds-full glass, that they had not done as well as the white students but nonetheless a lot were quite successful. But we were completely surprised. We found that they were doing every bit as well. There was no place we saw any serious discrepancy.

The line between hostility and acceptance between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems.