Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell (born September 3, 1963) is a writer for The New Yorker and best-selling author based in New York City. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He is best known for his books The Tipping Point (2000) Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), and What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009). He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto's Trinity College in 1984. During his high school years, Gladwell was an outstanding middle-distance runner and won the 1500 meter Midget Boys title at the 1978 Ontario High School championships in Kingston, Ontario, in a duel with eventual Canadian Open record holder David Reid, which he considers his greatest triumph.

Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

"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." - Reader's Digest | A Talent for Genius - Dec 2008 | pg 38-42.

“I’ve always been drawn to those who are exceptional or weird in some way… and the book is about people whose achievement exceeds every expectation. What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve.” - Ibid pg 38.

"Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer." - Ibid pg 38.

Reader's Digest: You write that talent and IQ don't matter as much as we think they do. What do we really need to become successful?
Gladwell: An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience. Bill Gates is successful largely because he had the good fortune to attend a school that gave him the opportunity to spend an enormous amount of time programming computers-more than 10,000 hours, in fact, before he ever started his own company. He was also born at a time when that experience was extremely rare, which set him apart. The Beatles had a musical gift, but what made them the Beatles was a random invitation to play in Hamburg, Germany, where they performed live as much as five hours a night, seven days a week. That early opportunity for practice made them shine. Talented? Absolutely. But they also simply put in more hours than anyone else. - Ibid pg 38-39.

Reader's Digest: How does a kid become the next Bill Gates or Tiger Woods?
Gladwell: Both of these men had parents who allowed their children to focus almost exclusively on what brought them joy and what they were good at. And both of them were able, as children, to invest an extraordinary amount of time in pursuing that particular passion. Again, not just a little time. The magic number for them, for Mozart, and for so many outliers, as I call them, appears to be 10,000 hours. - Ibid pg 39-40.

"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." - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

"Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out." - Ibid.

"We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible an depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately." - Ibid.

"The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire." - The Tipping Point

"In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours." - Outliers

"For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger role preparation seems to play." - Ibid.

"Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all." - Ibid.

"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing that makes you good." - Ibid.

If you know of any other significant quotes by this person, please email me with the quote and source information if possible.

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