Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far, his hematocrit will fall.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.

Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.

It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience; experience leads to proficiency; and the more proficient you are the more valuable you'll be.

Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.

being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience

[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.

The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.

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 have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)

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.

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

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. 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.

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. (150)