Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

He was maxed out. He had no resources left to do anything else. That's what happens when you're tired. Your decision-making skills erode. You start missing things—things that you would pick up on any other day.

If suicide is coupled, then it isn't simply the act of depressed people. It's the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.

The three rules of the Tipping Point—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context—offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.

All the outliers we've looked at so far were the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity. Lucky breaks don't seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and star athletes. They seem like the rule.

Don't look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.

Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often.

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.(p.115)

Mimicry, they argue, is also one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response—even a microsmile that takes no more than several milliseconds—it's not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you.

Practical intelligence is] practical in nature: that is, it's now knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.

Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

It is a strange thing, isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning?

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.

Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.

Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free.

all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.

Criticism is a privilege that you earn — it shouldn't be your opening move in an interaction…

How you feel about your abilities—your academic "self-concept"—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It's a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.

when you remove time, de becker says, you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction

The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.

If we want to, say, develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighborhoods, this tells us that we're probably better off building lots of little schools than one or two big ones.

If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward.