Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard.

The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as 'steroids.'

Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.

I never had those dreams of making the Olympics. Never.

The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.

It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.

The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

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.

You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

People assume when my hair is long that I am a lot cooler than I actually am. I am not opposed to this misconception, by the way, but it is a misconception.

All my books are optimistic!

Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.

I think that persistence and stubbornness and hard work are probably, at the end of the day, more important than the willingness to take a risk.

Why are man hole covers around?" If you don't knwo the answer to the questions, you're not smart enough to work at microsoft

If you're last in your class at Harvard, it doesn't feel like you're a good student, even though you really are. It's not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school.

If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.

The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.

It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.

The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.