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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.

-Malcolm Gladwell

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If A Window Is

Malcolm Gladwell

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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.

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Do I Think That American Democracy Ends If Trump Is President? No! I Think, There Are Plenty Of Checks And Balances In Place. I Think He Would Do Some Damage To The Country But We Would Recover. The Office Of The Presidency And American Democratic Institutions Are A Lot Stronger Than One Person. So If He Wins, Our Job Is Just To Keep The Office Strong, Right? And Hope He'll Be Replaced By Something Better!

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

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 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.

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

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)

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?

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

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

The Tipping Point Is The Biography Of An Idea, And The Idea Is Very Simple. It Is That The Best Way To Understand The Emergence Of Fashion Trends, The Ebb And Flow Of Crime Waves, Or, For That Matter, The Transformation Of Unknown Books Into Bestsellers, Or The Rise Of Teenage Smoking, Or The Phenomena Of Word Of Mouth, Or Any Number Of The Other Mysterious Changes That Mark Everyday Life Is To Think Of Them As Epidemics. Ideas And Products And Messages And Behaviors Spread Just Like Viruses Do.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I Would Say First Of All, Anyone Who Wants To Challenge The Status Quo Always Gets That Response. Ninety Percent Of The Time, That's Just Bull. That's Just The Way In Which People Choose To Prop Up Their Own Privilege Or Their Own Particular Position. So Mostly I Shrug It Off.

Our World Requires That Decisions Be Sourced And Footnoted, And If We Say How We Feel, We Must Also Be Prepared To Elaborate On Why We Feel That Way...we Need To Respect The Fact That It Is Possible To Know Without Knowing Why We Know And Accept That - Sometimes - We're Better Off That Way.

Success Is A Function Of Persistence And Doggedness And The Willingness To Work Hard For Twenty-two Minutes To Make Sense Of Something That Most People Would Give Up On After Thirty Seconds.

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

Incompetence Is Certainty In The Absence Of Expertise. Overconfidence Is Certainty In The Presence Of Expertise.

We Don't Know Where Our First Impressions Come From Or Precisely What They Mean, So We Don't Always Appreciate Their Fragility.

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.

Lands' End Has Undergone Three Major Changes Over The Past Couple Of Decades. The First Was The Introduction Of An 800 Number, In 1978; The Second Was Express Delivery, In 1994; And The Third Was The Introduction Of A Web Site, In 1995. The First Two Innovations Cut The Average Transaction Time-the Time Between The Moment Of Ordering And The Moment The Goods Are Received-from Three Weeks To Four Days. The Third Innovation Has Cut The Transaction Time From Four Days To, Well, Four Days.

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

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

Working Really Hard Is What Successful People Do.

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

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.

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

The Goal Of Storytelling Should Be To Make Stories As Ubiquitous As Music.

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

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

People Can't Do Much About The Fate Part, But We Can Certainly Do A Lot About The Man Part.

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

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

Who We Are Cannot Be Separated From Where We're From.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Nature Of Athletic Celebrity Is Increasingly Moving Away From The Actual Field Of Play.

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?

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Arousal Leaves Us Mind-blind.

My Highest Compliment Is When Someone Comes Up To Me To Say, "my 14-year-old Daughter, Or My 12-year-old Son Read Your Book And Loved It." I Cannot Conceive Of A Greater Compliment Than That - To Write Something That As An Adult I Find Satisfying, But Also That Manages To Reach A Curious 13- Or 14-year-old.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

...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.

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

The Biggest Mistake We Make Is Trying To Square The Way We Feel About Something Today With The Way We Felt About It Yesterday. You Shouldn’t Even Bother Doing It. You Should Just Figure Out The Way You Feel Today And If It Happens To Comply With What You Thought Before, Fine. If It Contradicts It, Whatever. Life Goes On.

There Are Some People, Who I'll Charitably Call Snobs, Who Are Dismissive Of Any Conversation That Doesn't Begin With The Full Level Of Complexity. That's Just Not How The World Works.

A Prediction, In A Field Where Prediction Is Not Possible, Is No More Than A Prejudice.

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

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.

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

In The Act Of Tearing Something Apart, You Lose Its Meaning.

The Poorer Children Were, To Her Mind, Often Better Behaved, Less Whiny, More Creative In Making Use Of Their Own Time, And Have A Well-developed Sense Of Independence.

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.

Sometimes The Most Modest Changes Can Bring About Enormous Effects.

You Can't Concentrate On Doing Anything If You Are Thinking, “what's Gonna Happen If It Doesn't Go Right?

We Tell Ourselves That Skill Is The Precious Resource And Effort Is The Commodity. It's The Other Way Around. Effort Can Trump Ability-relentl Ess Effort Is In Fact Something Rarer Than The Ability To Engage In Some Finely Tuned Act Of Motor Coordination.

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

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.

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?

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

Achievement Is Talent Plus Preparation

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.

As Human Beings, We Always Expect Everyday Change To Happen Slowly And Steadily, And For There To Be Some Relationship Between Cause And Effect.

Cause And Effect

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

The Religious Paradigm And The Science Fiction Paradigm Are Different. Apologies To Science Fiction Fans, But The Paradigm There Is To Create A New World And Describe It With A Kind Of Specificity That We Describe The World We Inhabit. Religiosity, On The Other Hand, Does None Of That.

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.

The Single Most Important Thing A City Can Do Is Provide A Community Where Interesting, Smart People Want To Live With Their Families.

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.

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

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.

Change Your Mind About Something Significant Every Day.

Changing Your Mind

When The Students Were Asked To Identify Their Race On A Pretest Questionnaire, That Simple Act Was Sufficient To Prime Them With All The Negative Stereotypes Associated With African Americans And Academic Achievement. If A White Student From A Prestigious Private High School Gets A Higher Sat Score Than A Black Student From An Inner-city School, Is It Because She’s Truly A Better Student, Or Is It Because To Be White And To Attend A Prestigious High School Is To Be Constantly Primed With The Idea Of “smart”?

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."

Humans Socialize In The Largest Groups Of All Primates Because We Are The Only Animals With Brains Large Enough To Handle The Complexities Of That Social Arrangement.

I've Always Been Baffled By How Much We Over-rate The Statistically Insignificant Differences That Separate Competitors At The Top End Of The Distribution.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, A Four-volume Work So Dense That Its Readers Were Evenly Divided Between Those Who Understood It And Thought It Was Brilliant And Those Who Did Not Understand It And Thought It Was Brilliant.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The Trick To Finding Ideas Is To Convince Yourself That Everyone And Everything Has A Story.

Father: 'anything But Journalism.' I Rebelled.

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.

The Successful Are Those Who Have Been Given Opportunities.

Presence Of Mind

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

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

People Are Experience-rich And Theory-poor.

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’.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It's Very Hard To Find Someone Who's Successful And Dislikes What They Do.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Don't Want To Be Like The Angry Old Guy In The Corner Who Is Always Ranting And Raving About The Same Things - But I Don't Mind Doing That Just A Little Bit!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Through Embracing The Diversity Of Humans Beings, We Will Find A Sure Way To True Happiness.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

People Are In One Of Two States In A Relationship,” Gottman Went On. “the First Is What I Call Positive Sentiment Override, Where Positive Emotion Overrides Irritability. It’s Like A Buffer. Their Spouse Will Do Something Bad, And They’ll Say, ‘oh, He’s Just In A Crummy Mood.’ Or They Can Be In Negative Sentiment Override, So That Even A Relatively Neutral Thing That A Partner Says Gets Perceived As Negative.

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.

Our Unconscious Reactions Come Out Of A Locked Room, And We Can't Look Inside That Room. But With Experience We Become Expert At Using Our Behavior And Our Training To Interpret - And Decode - What Lies Behind Our Snap Judgment And First Impressions.

First Impression

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

There Is Nothing More Common Than Critics Of Journalists Accusing Them Of Practicing Journalism. It Is Our Function In The World To Take Things That Are Complicated And Render Them In A Form That Non-experts Can Follow And Make Sense Of.

The Band-aid Solution Is Actually The Best Kind Of Solution Because It Involves Solving A Problem With The Minimum Amount Of Effort And Time And Cost.

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.

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

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?

Visionaries Are Limited By Their Visions.

If You Don't Contradict Yourself On A Regular Basis, Then You're Not Thinking.

Often A Sign Of Expertise Is Noticing What Doesn't Happen.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Policy Is Driven By More Than Politics, However. It Is Equally Driven By Ideas.

A Study At The University Of Utah Found That If You Ask Someone Why He Is Friendly With Someone Else, He’ll Say It Is Because He And His Friend Share Similar Attitudes. But If You Actually Quiz The Two Of Them On Their Attitudes, You’ll Find Out That What They Actually Share Is Similar Activities. We’re Friends With The People We Do Things With, As Much As We Are With The People We Resemble. We Don’t Seek Out Friends, In Other Words. We Associate With The People Who Occupy The Same Small, Physical Spaces That We Do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Look At The World Around You. It May Seem Like An Immovable, Implacable Place. It Is Not. With The Slightest Push - In Just The Right Place - It Can Be Tipped.

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.

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.

Superstar Lawyers And Math Whizzes And Software Entrepreneurs Appear At First Blush To Lie Outside Ordinary Experience. But They Don't. They Are Products Of History And Community, Of Opportunity And Legacy. Their Success Is Not Exceptional Or Mysterious. It Is Grounded In A Web Of Advantages And Inheritances, Some Deserved, Some Not, Some Earned, Some Just Plain Lucky - But All Critical To Making Them Who They Are. The Outlier, In The End, Is Not An Outlier At All.

A Radical And Transformative Thought Goes Nowhere Without The Willingness To Challenge Convention.

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.

If We Can Control The Environment In Which Rapid Cognition Takes Place, Then We Can Control Rapid Cognition

Lesson Number One: The Importance Of Being Jewish

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.

I Always Resist Seeing My Own Personal Motivation In My Work, But I Guess It Must Be There On Some Level. And I Do Feel Very Much That My Life Follows The Kinds Of Things I Talk About In My Books. I've Always Thought Of Myself As An Insanely Lucky Person, So Perhaps The Success Of My First Two Books Led Me To Want To Examine This Phenomenon On Some Unconscious Level.

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

Poverty Is Not Deprivation, It Is Isolation.

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

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.

Incompetence Annoys Me. Overconfidence Terrifies Me.

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

Asian Culture Has A Profoundly Different Relationship To Work. It Rewards People Who Are Persistent.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

That Is The Paradox Of The Epidemic: That In Order To Create One Contagious Movement, You Often Have To Create Many Small Movements First.

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

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.

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.

Emotion Is Contagious.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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