Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, CMis an English-born Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Outliers: The Story of Success, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, a collection of his journalism, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. All five books were...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 September 1963
CountryCanada
It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
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?
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.
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.
The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.
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.
..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.
The sad thing about doping is how much it obscures our appreciation of greatness.
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.
if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition
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.
Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.
Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.
You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?