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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.

-Malcolm Gladwell

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It Takes Ten Thousand

Malcolm Gladwell

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

...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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Achievement Is Talent Plus Preparation

Father: 'anything But Journalism.' I Rebelled.

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.

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

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.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

There Are Lots Of Issues More Important Than Where Billionaires Donate Their Money.

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

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

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

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

The Act Of Facing Overwhelming Odds Produces Greatness And Beauty.

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 Is A Simple Way To Package Information That, Under The Right Circumstances, Can Make It Irresistible. All You Have To Do Is Find It.

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.

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.

Outlier Are Those Who Have Been Given Opportunities-- -and Who Have Had The Strength And Presence Of Mind To Seize Them.

Presence Of Mind

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

Track Is Full Of The Absolute Nicest And Most Polite Athletes In All Of Sports, And Where Does It Get Us?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Basketball Is An Intricate, High-speed Game Filled With Split-second, Spontaneous Decisions. But That Spontaneity Is Possible Only When Everyone First Engages In Hours Of Highly Repetitive And Structured Practice--perfecting Their Shooting, Dribbling, And Passing And Running Plays Over And Over Again--and Agrees To Play A Carefully Defined Role On The Court. This Is The Critical Lesson Of Improve, Too, And It Is Also A Key To Understanding A Puzzle Of Millennium Challenge: Spontaneity Isn't Random.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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’.

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.

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.

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.

People Don't Rise From Nothing.

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.

If You Think Advantage Lies In Resources, Then You Think The Best Educational System Is The One That Spends The Most Money.

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?

The Answer Is That The Success Of Any Kind Of Social Epidemic Is Heavily Dependent On The Involvement Of People With A Particular And Rare Set Of Social Gifts.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 Key To Good Decision Making Is Not Knowledge. It Is Understanding. We Are Swimming In The Former. We Are Desperately Lacking In The Latter.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

Truly Successful Decision-making Relies On A Balance Between Deliberate And Instinctive Thinking.

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.

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.

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

Performance Ought To Improve With Experience, And Pressure Is An Obstacle That The Diligent Can Overcome.

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?

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

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

If You Want To Bring A Fundamental Change In People's Belief And Behavior...you Need To Create A Community Around Them, Where Those New Beliefs Can Be Practiced And Expressed And Nurtured.

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

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

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

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

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.

You Don't Start At The Top If You Want To Find The Story. You Start In The Middle, Because It's The People In The Middle Who Do The Actual Work In The World.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

..... It Would Be Interesting To Find Out What Goes On In That Moment When Someone Looks At You And Draws All Sorts Of Conclusions.

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.

Practice Isn't The Thing You Do Once You're Good. It's The Thing You Do That Makes You Good.

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 Injunction To Be Nice Is Used To Deflect Criticism And Stifle The Legitimate Anger Of Dissent.

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.

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.

There Are Moments, Particularly In Times Of Stress, When Haste Does Not Make Waste, When Our Snap Judgments And First Impressions Can Offer A Much Better Means Of Making Sense Of The World.

First Impression

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

We Prematurely Write Off People As Failures. We Are Too Much In Awe Of Those Who Succeed And Far Too Dismissive Of Those Who Fail.

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.

Nobody Accomplishes Success By Themselves.

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.

And My Advice For College Graduates Is Don't Reflexively Give Money To Your Alma Mater, Something Particular To Americans That I Find Extraordinary. Take Princeton, For Example - It Has More Money On A Per Capita Basis Than Any Educational Institution In The History Of Educational Institutions. There Is No Scenario Where It Can Spend All The Money Its Endowment Generates Every Year. If There Is Anyone Who Gives A Single Dollar To Princeton, They Have Completely Lost Their Mind. I Will Say That Without Reservation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Have The Kind Of Self-made-man Myth, Which Says That Super-successful People Did It Themselves.

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.

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

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."

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

Our Unconscious Is Really Good At Quick Decision-making - It Often Delivers A Better Answer Than More Deliberate And Exhaustive Ways Of Thinking.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Ipod Is Clearly A Tipping Point (and I'm Not Quite Sure It Is A Wholly Positive Development), Because It Is A Revolution In The Way That We Consume Creative Property, Which I Would Call Art. It Has Radically Changed The Relationship Between The Artist And The Audience, How Money Changes Hands, And How Much Money Changes Hands. Music Was The First, And Books Are Coming Next. The Kindle Or Some Form Of Electronic Book Is Clearly Inevitable, And It Will Massively Reshape How Books Are Sold, Who Pays For Them, And How They're Consumed. It Is Going To Be Really Fascinating.

There’s This Powerful Phrase In The Legal World, “difficult Cases Make Bad Law.” The Exception Is The Difficult Case. You Can’t Generalize Them By Definition. So Although They Are Fascinating, They Don’t Solve Any Problem Because They’re So One Of A Kind.

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

Change Your Mind About Something Significant Every Day.

Changing Your Mind

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

The Law Of The Few... Says That One Critical Factor In Epidemics Is The Nature Of The Messenger.

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.

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

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

That Was It! The Whole Redwood City Philosophy Was Based On A Willingness To Try Harder Than Anyone Else.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You Don't Manage A Social Wrong. You Should Be Ending It.

Visionaries Are Limited By Their Visions.

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.

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

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.

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