Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

Tigers. He was there with his wife, Paula, and their two boys, and his wife was reading the program, when she ran across a roster list just like the one above that you just looked

When we confront a stranger, we need to substitute an idea, a stereotype, for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often.

And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

if I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly

Ploughing and sowing   12     5.8 Cereal harvest   28   13.6

Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.

They're all between sixteen and twenty, so they'd be born in the late sixties.

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be

Kids with dyslexia are more likely to end up in the juvenile system, because they act up. It's because they can't figure things out. It's so important in our society to read.

Look at how easily Alex interrupts the doctor—I'm not ten. That's entitlement: his mother permits that casual incivility because she wants him to learn to assert himself with people in positions of authority.

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away.... Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.

what we think of as an advantage and as a disadvantage is not always correct, that we mix the categories up.

Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they're ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their

Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn't going to be afraid to speak up.

I'd rather have somebody who is real stupid but did something—even if it's wrong he did something—than have somebody who'd vacillate and do nothing." That's what LeMay values.

They were strangers to each other. If we were more thoughtful as a society—if we were willing to engage in some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers—she would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.

El éxito es talento más preparación. El problema de este punto de vista es que, cuanto más miran los psicólogos las carreras de los mejor dotados, menor les parece el papel del talento innato; y mayor el que desempeña la preparación.

Hooker knew everything he could possibly know about his enemy. But it didn't help him. The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

We answered him when we could. And when we couldn't, we would just give him a book.

Estaban tan concentrados en la mecánica y en los procesos, que eran incapaces de ver el problema desde una perspectiva holística. Cuando se descompone una cosa, se pierde su significado».

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. 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.

Sus investigaciones sugieren que una vez que un músico ha demostrado capacidad suficiente para ingresar en una academia superior de música, lo que distingue a un intérprete virtuoso de otro mediocre es el esfuerzo que cada uno dedica a practicar. Y eso no es todo: los que están en la misma cumbre no es que trabajen un poco o bastante más que todos los demás. Trabajan mucho, mucho más.

Si te salvas por los pelos, quedas traumatizado. Si te salvas holgadamente, piensas que eres invencible.