Background Image

...

Economists Often Talk About The 80/20 Principle, Which Is The Idea That In Any Situation Roughly 80 Percent Of The “work” Will Be Done By 20 Percent Of The Participants. In Most Societies, 20 Percent Of Criminals Commit 80 Percent Of Crimes. Twenty Percent Of Motorists Cause 80 Percent Of All Accidents. Twenty Percent Of Beer Drinkers Drink 80 Percent Of All Beer. When It Comes To Epidemics, Though, This Disproportionality Becomes Even More Extreme: A Tiny Percentage Of People Do The Majority Of The Work.

-Malcolm Gladwell

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Economists Often Talk About

Malcolm Gladwell

...

Economists Often Talk About The 80/20 Principle, Which Is The Idea That In Any Situation Roughly 80 Percent Of The “work” Will Be Done By 20 Percent Of The Participants. In Most Societies, 20 Percent Of Criminals Commit 80 Percent Of Crimes. Twenty Percent Of Motorists Cause 80 Percent Of All Accidents. Twenty Percent Of Beer Drinkers Drink 80 Percent Of All Beer. When It Comes To Epidemics, Though, This Disproportionality Becomes Even More Extreme: A Tiny Percentage Of People Do The Majority Of The Work.

Views: 7

Topic

More From Malcolm Gladwell

Giants Are Not What We Think They Are. The Same Qualities That Appear To Give Them Strength Are Often The Sources Of Great Weakness.

The Successful Are Those Who Have Been Given Opportunities.

Presence Of Mind

Sometimes Constraints Actually Create Success. Not Being Able To Swim Made Me Run. And Running Taught Me The Discipline I Needed As A Writer.

You Need To Have The Ability To Gracefully Navigate The World.

What Happens When Two People Talk? That Is Really The Basic Question Here, Because, That's The Basic Context In Which All Persuasion Takes Place.

What Track Needs To Figure Out: How To Engage Us Between The Races. Instead, The Entire Off-the-track Conversation Is About Doping. This Is How You Kill A Sport.

Once A Musician Has Enough Ability To Get Into A Top Music School, The Thing That Distinguishes One Performer From Another Is How Hard He Or She Works. That's It. And What's More, The People At The Very Top Don't Work Just Harder Or Even Much Harder Than Everyone Else. They Work Much, Much Harder.

In Fact, Researchers Have Settled On What They Believe Is The Magic Number For True Expertise: Ten Thousand Hours.

Acquaintances Represent A Source Of Social Power, And The More Acquaintances You Have The More Powerful You Are.

A Lot Of What Is Most Beautiful About The World Arises From Struggle.

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.

Where They Come From Matters. They're Products Of Particular Places And Environments.

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.

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.

We Cling To The Idea That Success Is A Simple Function Of Individual Merit And That The World In Which We All Grow Up And The Rules We Choose To Write As A Society Don't Matter At All.

In A Country That Never Wins Anything: In Canada, If One Of Our Athletes So Much As Makes The Final In A World Championship, We Declare A National Holiday.

If Everyone Has To Think Outside The Box, Maybe It Is The Box That Needs Fixing.

Those Three Things - Autonomy, Complexity, And A Connection Between Effort And Reward - Are, Most People Will Agree, The Three Qualities That Work Has To Have If It Is To Be Satisfying.

The Answer Is That We Are Not Helpless In The Face Of Our First Impressions. They May Bubble Up From The Unconscious - From Behind A Locked Door Inside Of Our Brain - But Just Because Something Is Outside Of Awareness Doesn't Mean It's Outside Of Control.

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.

Of The Great Entrepreneurs Of This Era, People Will Have Forgotten Steve Jobs.

The Tipping Point Is That Magic Moment When An Idea, Trend, Or Social Behavior Crosses A Threshold, Tips, And Spreads Like Wildfire.

What Do We Tell Our Children? Haste Makes Waste. Look Before You Leap. Stop And Think. Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover. We Believe That We Are Always Better Off Gathering As Much Information As Possible And Spending As Much Time As Possible In Deliberation.

It's Not About How Smart You Are. It's About Your Values.

If You Play An Audiotape Of A Yawn To Blind People, They'll Yawn Too.

The 10,000hr Rule Is A Definite Key In Success

The Issue Isn't The Accuracy Of The Bombs You Have, It's How You Use The Bombs You Have - And More Importantly, Whether You Ought To Use Bombs At All.

We Are Approaching Levels - If We're Not Beyond Levels - Of Threshold For The Number Of Messages That Consumers Can Take In In A Given Day. There Is A Kind Of Hunger For Some Kind Of New Approach To Getting The Word Out About Something.

Occasions When You Can Change Your Mind Should Be Cherished, Because They Mean You're Smarter Than You Were Before.

Visionaries Are Limited By Their Visions.

The Particular Skill That Allows You To Talk Your Way Out Of A Murder Rap, Or Convince Your Professor To Move You From The Morning To The Afternoon Section, Is What The Psychologist Robert Sternberg Calls "practical Intelligence." To Sternberg, Practical Intelligence Includes Things Like "knowing What To Say To Whom, Knowing When To Say It, And Knowing How To Say It For For Maximum Effect.

Cultural Legacies Are Powerful Forces. They Have Deep Roots And Long Lives. They Persist, Generation After Generation, Virtually Intact, Even As The Economic And Social And Demographic Conditions That Spawned Them Have Vanished, And They Play Such A Role In Directing Attitudes And Behavior That We Cannot Make Sense Of Our World Without Them.

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.

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.

Father: 'anything But Journalism.' I Rebelled.

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.

The Key To Good Decision Making Is Not Knowledge... It's Whether Our Work Fulfills Us.

...if You Work Hard Enough And Assert Yourself, And Use Your Mind And Imagination, You Can Shape The World To Your Desires. (151)

If A Window Is Broken And Left Unrepaired, People Walking By Will Conclude That No One Cares And No One Is In Charge. Soon, More Windows Will Be Broken, And The Sense Of Anarchy Will Spread From The Building To The Street On Which It Faces, Sending A Signal That Anything Goes.

Part Of Me Thinks That Innovation, Real Innovation In Health Care Delivery, Needs To Happen From The Bottom To The Top.

Shortly After The Birth Control Pill Was Approved For Public Distribution, One Woman Wrote To John Rock, Its Inventor, "you Should Be Afraid To Meet Your Maker." Rock, Despite Being Catholic Replied, "my Dear Madam, In My Faith, We Are Taught That The Lord Is With Us Always. When My Time Comes, There Will Be No Need For Introductions."

The Difference Isn't Resources, It's Attitude.

I Don't Really Collect Books. I Tend To Lose Interest In Them The Minute I've Read Them, So Most Of The Books I've Read Are Left In Airplanes And Hotel Rooms.

The Entire Principle Of A Blind Taste Test Was Ridiculous. They Shouldn't Have Cared So Much That They Were Losing Blind Taste Tests With Old Coke, And We Shouldn't At All Be Surprised That Pepsi's Dominance In Blind Taste Tests Never Translated To Much In The Real World. Why Not? Because In The Real World, No One Ever Drinks Coca-cola Blind.

A Book, I Was Taught Long Ago In English Class, Is A Living And Breathing Document That Grows Richer With Each New Reading.

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.

There Is This Tremendous Body Of Knowledge In The World Of Academia Where Extraordinary Numbers Of Incredibly Thoughtful People Have Taken The Time To Examine On A Really Profound Level The Way We Live Our Lives And Who We Are And Where We've Been. That Brilliant Learning Sometimes Gets Trapped In Academia And Never Sees The Light Of Day.

What Interests Me About Fiction Is Plot. And What Interests Me About Plot Is Whether Someone Tells A Story That Moves Me Within The Constraints Of Storytelling. And I Have Narrowly Defined Storytelling.

People Are Experience-rich And Theory-poor. I Help People Organize / Make Sense Of Their Experiences.

If You're In Business It's Both A Promise And A Warning. It Says That Sometimes Little Things Can Cause Some Little Guy To Have An Overnight Success.

Six Degrees Of Separation Doesn't Mean That Everyone Is Linked To Everyone Else In Just Six Steps. It Means That A Very Small Number Of People Are Linked To Everyone Else In A Few Steps, And The Rest Of Us Are Linked To The World Through Those Special Few.

So The First Task Of A Police Force Is Not To Fight Crime And Enforce The Law. It Is To Establish Legitimacy With The Law-abiding Citizenry And Then Fight Crime And Enforce The Law.

Being Able To Act Intelligently And Instinctively In The Moment Is Possible Only After A Long And Rigorous Of Education And Experience

My Point Is That The Great Challenge Of An Artist Is To Balance Those Two Things: To Be Strong Enough To Have Your Own Personal Vision That You Will Put On The Page Or The Canvas Or The Screen, No Matter What People Say, But It Requires A Radical Sensitivity. You Have To Be Completely Open To What The World Is Telling You, To What Your Audience Tells You. And Balancing Those Two Things Is Nearly Impossible.

When People In Authority Want The Rest Of Us To Behave, It Matters-first And Foremost-how They Behave.

Radio Stations Have Constructed A Narrow Door[way], And That's Because They Don't Understand How Complex And Paradoxical Our Snap Judgments Are. It's Hard To Measure New Songs.

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.

I'm Someone Who Can Provide An Intellectual Framework, But I Can't Tell People Who Are Trying To Sell Product X How To Do That Because I Don't Know, And I Would Be Faking It If I Attempted To Step Into That Role.

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.

Without The New York Times, There Is No Blog Community. They'd Have Nothing To Blog About.

Sometimes The Most Modest Changes Can Bring About Enormous Effects.

I'm In The Storytelling Business, And So You're Always Drawn To The Unusual. And Early On, I Discovered That's The Easiest Way To Tell Stories... If You Come Up Through A Newspaper As I Did, Your Whole Goal Is To Get A Story On The Front Page, And You Only Get Something On The Front Page If It's Unusual.

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.

Bad Improvisers Block Action, Often With A High Degree Of Skill. Good Improvisers Develop Action.

The Lesson Here Is Very Simple. But It Is Striking How Often It Is Overlooked. We Are So Caught In The Myths Of The Best And The Brightest And The Self-made That We Think Outliers Spring Naturally From The Earth. We Look At The Young Bill Gates And Marvel That Our World Allowed That Thirteen-year-old To Become A Fabulously Successful Entrepreneur. But That's The Wrong Lesson. Our World Only Allowed One Thirteen-year-old Unlimited Access To A Time Sharing Terminal In 1968. If A Million Teenagers Had Been Given The Same Opportunity, How Many More Microsofts Would We Have Today?

The Sad Thing About Doping Is How Much It Obscures Our Appreciation Of Greatness.

What Must Underlie Successful Epidemics, In The End, Is A Bedrock Belief That Change Is Possible, That People Can Radically Transform Their Behavior Or Beliefs In The Face Of The Right Kind Of Impetus.

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.

We Spend A Lot Of Time And Effort Trying To Figure Out Who's Going To Be A Good Nfl Quarterback, And We Do A Very Bad Job Of It. We Don't Really Know. And We Also Spend A Lot Of Time Trying To Figure Out Who Will Be A Good Teacher, And We're Really Bad At That Too. We Don't Know If Someone Is Going To Be A Good Teacher When They Start Teaching. So What Should We Do In Those Situations In Which Predictions Are Useless?

An Aggressive Drug-testing Program Would Cut Down On Certain Abuses, But Its Never Going To Catch Everyone - Or Even Close To Everyone.

If There Is One Thing I Learned By Reading Epstein's "the Sports Gene" It Is That World-class Athletes Are, By Definition, Abnormal: That Is, The Kind Of Person Capable Of Competing At That Level Is Necessarily Very Different From The Rest Of Us Physiologically. They Are Outliers.

It Takes Ten Thousand Hours To Truly Master Anything. Time Spent Leads To Experience; Experience Leads To Proficiency; And The More Proficient You Are The More Valuable You'll Be.

We Need To Look At The Subtle, The Hidden, And The Unspoken.

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 Sense Of Possibility So Necessary For Success Comes Not Just From Inside Us Or From Our Parents. It Comes From Our Time: From The Particular Opportunities That Our Place In History Presents Us With.

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.

Does That Mean We Should Give Up? Probably. But There Are Two Issues Worth Considering. The First Is - Is It Really True That Drugs Destroy The Integrity Of The Game?

People Don't Rise From Nothing.

Take A Random Group Of 8-year-old American And Japanese Kids, Give Them All A Really, Really Hard Math Problem, And Start A Stopwatch. The American Kids Will Give Up After 30, 40 Seconds. If You Let The Test Run For 15 Minutes, The Japanese Kids Will Not Have Given Up. You Have To Take It Away.

When It's Easy To Make Money, You Have No Incentive To Think About Development Of Talent.

Poverty Is Not Deprivation, It Is Isolation.

The Visionary Starts With A Clean Sheet Of Paper, And Re-imagines The World.

There Are Exceptional People Out There Who Are Capable Of Starting Epidemics. All You Have To Do Is Find Them.

Understanding The True Nature Of Instinctive Decision Making Requires Us To Be Forgiving Of Those People Trapped In Circumstances Where Good Judgment Is Imperiled.

Trump Is An Innovator Who Has Shown How Out Of Step The Political Establishment Was. Which I Think, Probably, In The Long Term Will Be Healthy. We Have To Figure Out How To Reinvigorate Our Political Institutions And He's Demonstrating To Us The Urgency Of That Task.

The Conventional Wisdom Is Often Wrong. Crime Didn't Keep Soaring In The 1990s, Money Alone Doesn't Win Elections, And - Surprise - Drinking Eight Glasses Of Water A Day Has Never Actually Been Shown To Do A Thing For Your Health. Conventional Wisdom Is Often Shoddily Formed And Devilishly Difficult To See Through, But It Can Be Done.

I'm Convinced That Ideas And Behaviors And New Products Move Through A Population Very Much Like A Disease Does.

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.

Decisions We Make

Achievement Is Talent Plus Preparation. The Problem With This View Is That The Closer Psychologists Look At The Careers Of The Gifted, The Smaller The Role Innate Talent Seems To Play And The Bigger The Role Preparation Seems To Play.

Our Intuitions, As Humans, Aren't Always Very Good. Changes That Happen Really Suddenly, On The Strength Of The Most Minor Of Input, Can Be Deeply Confusing.

What Does It Say About A Society That It Devotes More Care And Patience To The Selection Of Those Who Handle Its Money Than Of Those Who Handle Its Children?

We Learn By Example And By Direct Experience Because There Are Real Limits To The Adequacy Of Verbal Instruction.

I Interviewed One Of The Most Powerful Lawyers In The World And He Told Me, "at The Time, It Was The Worst Thing In The World Not To Be Able To Get A Job At A Fancy Law Firm, But It's The Greatest Thing That Ever Happened In My Life." It Was A Humble Acknowledgment Of How Forces Much Larger Than Himself Shaped His Career. I Really Wanted To Bring That Point Home.

Instead Of Thinking About Talent As Something That You Acquire, Talent Should Be Thought Of As Something That You Develop.

The Face Is Not A Secondary Billboard For Our Internal Feelings. It Is An Equal Partner In The Emotional Process.

The People At The Top Don't Work Just Harder Or Even Much Harder Than Everyone Else. They Work Much, Much Harder.

Arousal Leaves Us Mind-blind.

Did They Know Why They Knew? Not At All. But The Knew!

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

When People Reflexively Write Checks To Institutions That Have Billions Of Dollars In The Bank, They Are Essentially Committing A Moral Crime. Your Money Could Do Good In This World And You're Choosing Instead To Waste It. People Have To Do A Better Job Of That. You've Got To Find Places Where Your Money's Going To Do Some Good And Direct Your Dollars Towards That Institution.

We Sometimes Think Of Being Good At Mathematics As An Innate Ability. You Either Have "it" Or You Don't. But To Schoenfeld, It's Not So Much Ability As Attitude. You Master Mathematics If You Are Willing To Try.

I Worry That Track Is Going To Enter Into An Impossibly Complicated Stage, Where Our Understanding Of The Complexities Of Human Physiology - And Our Ability To Accentuate And Exploit Them - Is Going To Make The Notion Of Pure Competition Impossible.

Success Has To Do With Deliberate Practice. Practice Must Be Focused, Determined, And In An Environment Where There's Feedback.

As A Writer, I Know That - You Write A First Draft And Then Put It In A Drawer. The Longer I Can Put It In A Drawer, The Better Off I Am. So I Structure My Writing So That Things Can Sit.

One Of The Things I Think The Police Have To Do Is To Stop Behaving Like Armies.

I Have A New Way Of Doing Things, And I Don’t Care If You Think I’m Crazy.

What Is Learned Out Of Hard Work And Trial Is Inevitably More Powerful Than What Is Learned Easily.

We Need To Be Clear When We Venerate Entrepreneurs What We Are Venerating.they Are Not Moral Leaders. If They Were Moral Leaders, They Wouldn't Be Great Businessmen.

The Rule Of 150 Says That Congregants Of A Rapidly Expanding Church, Or The Members Of A Social Club, Or Anyone In A Group Activity Banking On The Epidemic Spread Of Shared Ideals Needs To Be Particularly Cognizant Of The Perils Of The Bigness. Crossing The 150 Line Is A Small Change That Can Make A Big Difference.

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.

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.

We Tend To Credit Those Who Create An Idea, Not Those Who Perfect It, Forgetting That It Is Often Only In The Perfection Of An Idea That True Progress Occurs. Putting Sixty-four Transistors On A Chip Allowed People To Dream Of The Future. Putting Four Million Transistors On A Chip Actually Gave Them The Future.

To Build A Better World We Need To Replace The Patchwork Of Lucky Breaks And Arbitrary Advantages Today That Determine Success--the Fortunate Birth Dates And The Happy Accidents Of History--with A Society That Provides Opportunities For All.

Happy Accidents

Activism That Challenges The Status Quo, That Attacks Deeply Rooted Problems, Is Not For The Faint Of Heart.

Whenever We Have Something That We Are Good At--something We Care About--that Experience And Passion Fundamentally Change The Nature Of Our First Impressions.

First Impression

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.

..... 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 Became Convinced That Knowing Lots Of People Was Kind Of Skill, Something That The Diligent Can Overcome.

To Become A Chess Grandmaster Also Seems To Take About Ten Years. (only The Legendary Bobby Fisher Got To That Elite Level In Less Than That Amount Of Time: It Took Him Nine Years.) And What's Ten Years? Well, It's Roughly How Long It Takes To Put In Ten Thousand Hours Of Hard Practice. Ten Thousand Hours Is The Magic Number Of Greatness.

Economists Often Talk About The 80/20 Principle, Which Is The Idea That In Any Situation Roughly 80 Percent Of The “work” Will Be Done By 20 Percent Of The Participants. In Most Societies, 20 Percent Of Criminals Commit 80 Percent Of Crimes. Twenty Percent Of Motorists Cause 80 Percent Of All Accidents. Twenty Percent Of Beer Drinkers Drink 80 Percent Of All Beer. When It Comes To Epidemics, Though, This Disproportionality Becomes Even More Extreme: A Tiny Percentage Of People Do The Majority Of The Work.

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.

Happiness, In One Sense, Is A Function Of How Closely Our World Conforms To The Infinite Variety Of Human Preference.

I Write My Books To Challenge My Own Feelings And Theories. Perhaps Most Surprising Was What I Learned About Rice Farming. It Was Really Interesting To Think Of How Different Asian And Western Cultures Are As A Result Of The Kinds Of Agricultural Practices That Our Ancestors Used For Thousands Of Years. The Life Of A Chinese Peasant In The Middle Ages Was So Dramatically Different From The Life Of A European Peasant - Night And Day Different.

I Don't Think 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.

There Can Be As Much Value In The Blink Of An Eye As In Months Of Rational Analysis.

All Artists Have To Do That At A Certain Point. This Shift That Has To Happen Between The Initial Moment Of Creation And Then The Consideration Of What Has Been Created.

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.

Since Becoming A Journalist, Each Time I Engage With Subjects I Become More Radicalized.

My Earliest Memories Of My Father Are Of Seeing Him Work At His Desk And Realizing That He Was Happy. I Did Not Know It Then, But That Was One Of The Most Precious Gifts A Father Can Give His Child.

An Incredibly High Percentage Of Successful Entrepreneurs Are Dyslexic. That's One Of The Little-known Facts.

The Fact Of Being An Underdog Changes People In Ways That We Often Fail To Appreciate. It Opens Doors And Creates Opportunities And Enlightens And Permits Things That Might Otherwise Have Seemed Unthinkable.

Anyone Who Has Ever Scanned The Bookshelves Of A New Girlfriend Or Boyfriend- Or Peeked Inside His Or Her Medicine Cabinet- Understands This Implicitly; You Can Learn As Much - Or More - From One Glance At A Private Space As You Can From Hours Of Exposure To A Public Face.

[norden] Said, With The Mark 15 Norden Bombsight, He Could Drop A Bomb Into A Pickle Barrel At 20,000 Feet.

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.

I Should Point Out That I Have A Picture Of Asbel Kiprop As The Screensaver On My Phone. Is That Embarrassing?

There's No Idea That Can't Be Explained To A Thoughtful 14-year-old. If The Thoughtful 14-year-old Doesn't Get It, It Is Your Fault, Not The 14-year-old's.

Sometimes [genius] Is Just The Thing That Emerges After Twenty Years Of Working At Your Kitchen Table.

If People Disobey, Don't Ask What Is Wrong With Them, Ask What's Wrong With Their Leaders.

Consistency Is The Most Overrated Of All Human Virtues... I'm Someone Who Changes His Mind All The Time.

The Hope With Tipping Point Was It Would Help The Reader Understand That Real Change Was Possible. With Blink, I Wanted To Get People To Take The Enormous Power Of Their Intuition Seriously. My Wish With Outliers Is That It Makes Us Understand How Much Of A Group Project Success Is. When Outliers Become Outliers It Is Not Just Because Of Their Own Efforts. It's Because Of The Contributions Of Lots Of Different People And Lots Of Different Circumstances.

The Ethics Of Plagiarism Have Turned Into The Narcissism Of Small Differences: Because Journalism Cannot Own Up To Its Heavily Derivative Nature, It Must Enforce Originality On The Level Of The Sentence.

I Don't Like Things That Aren't True.

I Suspect People Who Are Indecisive Are People Who Are Far Too Enamored Of Analysis In All Settings And Are Destroying Their Ability To Make An Instinctive Judgment Through Over-analysis And That's Dangerous.

It's As If You Were Interested In Fashion And Your Neighbor When You Were Growing Up Happened To Be Giorgio Armani.

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. Otherwise, How Would You Ever Do The Thing That You Are Doing?

An Innate Gift And A Certain Amount Of Intelligence Are Important, But What Really Pays Is Ordinary Experience.

The First Person Who Throws The Rock Is A Lot More Radical Than A Hundredth Person.by The Time The Riot Has Attracted A Hundred People, You Don't Have To Be Nearly As Much Of A Daredevil Or A Hothead Or Committed Or Any Of Those Things To Want To Engage In A Riot.

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.

Re-reading Is Much Underrated. I've Read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Once Every Five Years Since I Was 15. I Only Started To Understand It The Third Time.

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.

Working Really Hard Is What Successful People Do.

Starting Epidemics Requires Concentrating Resources On A Few Key Area. The Law Of The Few Says That Connectors, Mavens, And Salesman Are Responsible For Starting Word-of-mouth Epidemics, Which Means That If You Are Interested In Starting A Word-of-mouth Epidemic , Your Resources Ought To Be Solely Concentrated On These Three Groups. No One Else Matters.

Jenny Simpson Loses Her Shoe In The Women's Fifteen Hundred, With A Lap And A Half To Go, Destroying Her Chances To Repeat As World Champion, And She Gives The Most Gracious Interview Afterward About How She's Had A Wonderful Career Already. Great For Jenny Simpson. Bad For The Sport! We Need Drama!

The Kinds Of Errors That Cause Plane Crashes Are Invariably Errors Of Teamwork And Communication.

People Who Are Busy Doing Things - As Opposed To People Who Are Busy Sitting Around, Like Me, Reading And Having Coffee In Coffee Shops -don't Have Opportunities To Kind Of Collect And Organize Their Experiences And Make Sense Of Them.

We Vary Greatly In The Natural Advantages That We've Been Given. The World's Not Fair

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.

For Every Romantic Possiblity, No Matter How Robust, There Exists At Least One Equal And Opposite Sentence, Phrase, Or Word Capable Of Extinguishing It.

I Recently Talked To An Eighteen-year-old - A Huge Fifa Fan - And Realized That He Spends More Time Playing The Fifa Video Game Than He Does Watching Actual Fifa Games.

The Best Example Of How Impossible It Will Be For Major League Baseball To Crack Down On Steroids Is The Fact That Baseball And The Media Are Still Talking About The Problem As "steroids.

Hard Work Is A Prison Sentence Only If It Does Not Have Meaning.

The Act Of Facing Overwhelming Odds Produces Greatness And Beauty.

A Fan Is Always An Outsider. Most Sportswriters Are Not, By This Definition, Fans. They Capitalize On Access To Athletes. They Spoke To Kobe Last Night, And Kobe Says His Finger Is Going To Be Fine. They Spent Three Days Fly-fishing With Brett Favre In March, And Brett Says He's Definitely Coming Back For Another Season.

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.

First Impression

When You're An Underdog, You're Forced To Try Things You Would Never Otherwise Have Attempted.

Every Cop Will Tell You That Their Real Job Is Being A Social Worker. That's What They Do All Day. The Large Majority Of Police Officers In This Country Never Even Draw Their Gun, Let Alone Fire It. They Do Conflict Resolution, Right? And If That's Their Job, Why Do They Need To Look Like They're An Occupying Force?

My Writing Model Is My Mother, Who Is A Writer As Well. She Always Valued Clarity And Simplicity Above All Else. If Someone Doesn't Understand What You're Writing, Then Everything Else You Do Is Superfluous. Irrelevant. If Any Thoughtful, Curious Reader Finds What I Do Impenetrable, I've Failed.

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.

The Conventional Explanation For Jewish Success, Of Course, Is That Jews Come From A Literate, Intellectual Culture. They Are Famously "the People Of The Book." There Is Surely Something To That. But It Wasn't Just The Children Of Rabbis Who Went To Law School. It Was The Children Of Garment Workers. And Their Critical Advantage In Climbing The Professional Ladder Wasn't The Intellectual Rigor You Get From Studying The Talmud. It Was The Practical Intelligence And Savvy You Get From Watching Your Father Sell Aprons On Hester Street.

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)

Change Your Mind About Something Significant Every Day.

Changing Your Mind

When Writing, You Can't Break Physical Rules. You Can't Have People Come Back From The Dead. That's Cheating. I Am A Kind Of Narrative Fundamentalist In Many Ways.

It Is The New And Different That Is Always Most Vulnerable To Market Research.

If You Look At The Careers Of Great Entrepreneurs And You Look At The Moment They Took Their Plunge, The Plunge Is Rarely A Great Financial Or Material Risk, It’s A Social Risk. At The Moment They Started Their New Businesses, Everyone Around Them Said ‘you’re An Idiot’.

It's Not How Much Money We Make That Ultimately Makes Us Happy Between Nine And Five. It's Whether Or Not Our Work Fulfills Us. Being A Teacher Is Meaningful.

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.

Success Is Not A Random Act. It Arises Out Of A Predictable And Powerful Set Of Circumstances And Opportunities.

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.

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.

Success Is A Function Of Persistence And Doggedness And The Willingness To Work Hard.

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.

When We Become Expert In Something, Our Tastes Grow More Esoteric And Complex.

I'm A Purist: I Start To Wrinkle My Nose When The Cold War Ends.

David Epstein, The Author Of The Best Book On Athletics In Recent Memory - "the Sports Gene" - Wrote To Me To Say That He Thinks I'm Being Overly Generous. He Points Out That, For Years, There Used To Be An "all-star Challenge" On Television, In Which The Best Professional Athletes From A Variety Of Sports Competed In A Kind Of Makeshift Decathlon.

Extreme Visual Clarity, Tunnel Vision, Diminished Sound, And The Sense That Time Is Slowing Down. This Is How The Human Body Reacts To Extreme Stress.

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.

In Order To Get One Of The Greatest Inventions Of The Modern Age, In Other Words, We Thought We Needed The Solitary Genius. But If Alexander Graham Bell Had Fallen Into The Grand River And Drowned That Day Back In Brantford, The World Would Still Have Had The Telephone, The Only Difference Being That The Telephone Company Would Have Been Nicknamed Ma Gray, Not Ma Bell.

Innovators Have To Be Open. They Have To Be Able To Imagine Things That Others Cannot And Be Willing To Challenge Their Own Preconceptions. They Also Need To Be Conscientious. An Innovator Who Has Brilliant Ideas But Lacks The Discipline And Persistence To Carry Them Out Is Merely A Dreamer ... But Crucially, Innovators Need To Be Disagreeable ... They Are People Willing To Take Social Risks-to Do Things That Others Might Disapprove Of.

People Who Bring Transformative Change Have Courage, Know How To Re-frame The Problem And Have A Sense Of Urgency.

Science Fiction Annoyed Me Because It Was Like, "why Is The World As It Is Not Enough For You?"

Television Allows The Audience To Argue With The Creator In A Way You Don't In A Movie.

When Crime Drops Dramatically In New York For No Apparent Reason, Or When A Movie Made On A Shoestring Budget Ends Up Making Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars - We're Surprised. I'm Saying, Don't Be Surprised. This Is The Way Social Epidemics Work.

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.

Individual Talent

We Can Unravel The Logic Behind Who Succeeds And Who Doesn't.

Insight Is Not A Lightbulb That Goes Off Inside Our Heads. It Is A Flickering Candle That Can Easily Be Snuffed Out.

You May Hate Hillary Clinton And You May Have Good Reason For Hating Hillary Clinton, But Hillary Clinton Is One Person Who Even If She's Elected Will Be Gone One Day And You Still Have The Task Of Keeping American Democracy Going.

I'm Necessarily Parasitic In A Way. I Have Done Well As A Parasite. But I'm Still A Parasite.

You Can Learn As Much - Or More - From One Glance At A Private Space As You Can From Hours Of Exposure To A Public Face.

Our Acquaintances—not Our Friends—are Our Greatest Source Of New Ideas And Information. The Internet Lets Us Exploit The Power Of These Kinds Of Distant Connections With Marvellous Efficiency.

The Difference Between A Crime Of Evil And A Crime Of Illness Is The Difference Between A Sin And A Symptom.

Trending Author

Christopher Marlowe

Robert Grosseteste

Category