Malcolm Gladwell Thinking Quotations

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.

When I see someone who reads something of mine and draws something out of it that's very different from my perspective, I think that's actually cool. Sometimes it's worrisome when you feel they badly misinterpret it, but it just says that they're thinking, and they're bringing their own interpretation to bear on it. That's part of the wonderful thing about putting words into the world, and if I was worried about that, I couldn't be a writer.

I don't think we [people] are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.

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.

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.

If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.

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.

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.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.

It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.

Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.

Anyone who knows the marketing world knows that ideas come and go, and people latch onto things and think of them as a kind of solution....

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.

You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?

...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.

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.

I have a new way of doing things, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? 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—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making - it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.

Have you ever wondered... how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists... but the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power.

Instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop.

So, it's a very, you know - maybe we're wrong in - you know, we go around thinking the innovator is the person who's first to kind of conceive of something. And maybe the innovation process continues down the line to the second and the third and the fourth entrant into a field.

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.

If you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.

That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.

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.

It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.

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.

The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.

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

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.

[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.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.