Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

About Malcolm Gladwell:

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell is a 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 (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013). All five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.

Malcolm Gladwell

Age-class running, as you know, is completely unreliable. It's based on this artificial thing, which is that people who are the same age have the same level of physical maturity. Which just isn't true.

Malcolm Gladwell

The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.

Malcolm Gladwell

Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.

Malcolm Gladwell

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

Malcolm Gladwell

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those specia...

Malcolm Gladwell

In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.

Malcolm Gladwell

The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.

Malcolm Gladwell

Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twen...

Malcolm Gladwell

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

Malcolm Gladwell

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not, With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.

Malcolm Gladwell

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder ...

Malcolm Gladwell

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 an...

Malcolm Gladwell

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a ...

Malcolm Gladwell

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we we...

Malcolm Gladwell

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

Malcolm Gladwell

Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation

Malcolm Gladwell

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.

Malcolm Gladwell

That's like being a hockey player born on January I.

Malcolm Gladwell

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and mak...

Malcolm Gladwell

Author Bio

  • NameMalcolm Gladwell
  • Descriptionjournalist and science writer
  • BornSeptember 3, 1963
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionJournalist; Writer; Screenwriter
  • WorksThe Tipping Point; Blink; Outliers; What The Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
  • AwardsMember Of The Order Of Canada