Quotes About Achievement

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.

way the world of classical music picks its future virtuosos, or the way the world of ballet picks its future ballerinas, or the way our elite educational system picks its future scientists and intellectuals. You can't buy your way into Major Junior A hockey. It doesn't matter who your father or mother is, or who your grandfather was, or what business your family is in. Nor does it matter

success follows a predictable course.

Malcolm Gladwell

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 one thing that all educational researchers agree about is that teacher quality matters far more than the size of the class. A great teacher can teach your child a year and a half's material in one year. A below-average teacher might teach your child half a year's material in one year.

take control of the machinery of achievement, in other words—not just in sports but, as we

Judgment matters: it is what separates winners from losers.

in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the skilled, the talented, and the driven—I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

Era un ejemplo de cómo los fuera de serie de un campo particular alcanzaban el estatus más alto mediante una combinación de capacidad, oportunidad y ventaja completamente arbitraria

Now let's do the same kind of analysis for people like

O sucesso é uma combinação de talento e preparação. O problema com essa forma de pensar é que, quanto mais a fundo os psicólogos analisam as carreiras dos talentosos, menor parece o papel desempenhado pelo talento e maior se mostra a importância da preparação.

the miracle of meaningful work.

Malcolm Gladwell

Chamberlain would later

Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything

Malcolm Gladwell

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it's the biggest nine-and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call accumulative advantage.

where winning cost us so much morally?

that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

were barely more than toddlers. The game was broadcast on Canadian national television. Up and down