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
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—and 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”?
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.
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.
The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.
People assume when my hair is long that I am a lot cooler than I actually am. I am not opposed to this misconception, by the way, but it is a misconception.
Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.
Both Jim and I are interested in the limits of conventional decision-making. The idea that an expert will give you the best outcome -- we think that's inadequate. You need a whole palate of different strategies. We're critiquing the same narrow ideology.
Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.
My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.
We aren't, as human beings, very good at acting in our best interest.
If I was President of the United States, I'd rather be right than interesting. If I was CEO of a company, I'd rather be right than interesting. But I'm a journalist - what journalist would rather be right than interesting?
For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty - again, not a large number.
From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.
I don't understand, given the constraints physicians have in doing their job and the paperwork demanded of them, why people want to be physicians. I think we've made it very, very difficult for them to perform their job. I think that's a shame.