Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian best-selling author, speaker and journalist. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. Before that, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. He is also author of Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers. Below you can find some of the most inspirational words that Malcolm Gladwell has written that will help you by giving you a daily dose of wisdom.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Top 39 Quotes
1. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
2. “We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”
3.“Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.”
4. “In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”
5. “To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer 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.”
6. “The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart.”
7. “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
8. “Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth.”
9. “When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance.”
10. “Imagine that you are a doctor and you suddenly learn that you’ll see twenty patients on a Friday afternoon instead of twenty-five, while getting paid the same. Would you respond by spending more time with each patient? Or would you simply leave at six-thirty instead of seven-thirty and have dinner with your kids?”
11. “What is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.”
12. “Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
13. “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.”
14. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”
15. “If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”
16. “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.”
17. “Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”
18. “Achievement is talent plus preparation.”
19. “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
20. “To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.”
21. “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.”
22. “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning”
23. “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.”
24. “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”
25. “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”
26. “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…. Spontaneity isn’t random.”
27. “The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”
28. “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.”
29. “We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.”
30. “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.
31. “The world we could have is so much richer than the world we have settled for.”
32. “There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources- and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.”
33. “IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savvy is knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.”
34. “Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because the act of facing overwhelming odds, produces greatness and beauty.”
36. “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.”
37. “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
38. “For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth.”
39. “Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.”
