Malcolm Gladwell Men Quotations

Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of “their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.

If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.

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

I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)

We [people] can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.

if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition

There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.

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

What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.

Success is not a function of individual talent. It's the steady accumulation of advantages. It's bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors.

We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves.

Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.

When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.

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.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

In the government's eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.

It's the boiling point. It's the moment when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.

There is an important idea in psychology: The 'just world theory,' which says that it is very important for us to convince ourselves that the world is just and things happen for a reason. That there is some elemental fairness in everything, which creates the illusion of justice.

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.

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

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

Achievement is talent plus preparation

It made me realize that I'd changed what I thought was a trivial aspect of who I was but it profoundly made a difference in the way the world perceived me. That was when I thought it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.

I remember as a kid watching one of the Olympic games, and I was cheering for a big track athlete. He was the favorite to win, and he lost. I realized in that moment the pain he felt was so much greater than the pain that those who never thought they were going to win would have felt had they lost.