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
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.
Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making - it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.
Have you ever wondered... how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists... but the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power.
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 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.
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.
Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They'd have nothing to blog about.
Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.
Instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop.
The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.
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.
Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.
I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.
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.