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 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.
Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
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.
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.
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.
It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.
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.
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.