Malcolm Gladwell Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Leadership #Positivity #Creative

“I think actually the marketing community is approaching a crisis: There are just too many messages competing for too little attention. That is the fundamental problem.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Thinking #Community #Marketing

“That's your responsibility as a person, as a human being - to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Responsibility #Thinking #Bases

“It changes how people read you if you believe in God. It gives insight into your motivation, how you look at problems and how you deal with people.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Motivation #Believe #People

“When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Trying #Underdog

“If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Book #Thinking #Ideas

“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.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Success #Swimming #Keys

“By shifting the balance away from the individual we open the door for the individual. Because we make it obvious that anyone can do it given the right circumstance.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Doors #Balance #Shifting

“The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Beauty #Greatness #Odds

“I'm totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it's OK because I'm doing it for a reason, for a good reason.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Thinking #Stereotype #Reason

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Success #Ideas #Magic

“So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Writing #Thinking #Long

“The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#People #Profound #World

“People at CDC [Centers for Disease Control] who cut their teeth on diseases over the last 10 years have started to think of crime as another disease, and using some of these same concepts. It was something that was in the air in that world, but it was time to bust it out and apply it to any number of different social epidemics.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Cutting #Thinking #Epidemics

“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.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Success #Problem #Storytelling

“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.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Hard Work #Persistence #Thinking

“That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Epidemics #Order #Firsts

“Success is deeply rooted in time and place. You may have the drive to read tons of books on biology. But if there are no books on biology in your library, and the library is never open, your drive is meaningless.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Book #Library #May

“A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Challenges #Conventions #Radical

“The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Long #People #World

“Emotion is contagious.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Success #Entrepreneur #Emotion

“If your parents are billionaires, that might actually be an obstacle to your own happiness and self-development. If you go to Oxford or Harvard, that might actually thwart your desire to graduate with a science or math degree.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Math #Self #Oxford

“Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Mean #First Impression #Firsts

“..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Success #Interesting #Would Be

“I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Success #People #Succeed

“You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Jobs #Media #Looks

“When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Thinking #Development #Incentives

“There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Bills #Malaria #World

“What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Powerful #Thinking #Community

“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.”
-- Malcolm Gladwell

#Success #Communication #Writing