"The sad thing about doping is how much it obscures our appreciation of greatness."
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Quote collection
Malcolm Gladwell quotes (page 2 of 16)
304 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning."
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"The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit."
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"The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty."
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"Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback."
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"People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency."
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"The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are."
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"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."
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"We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction."
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"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."
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"Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer ... But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable ... They are people willing to take social risks-to do things that others might disapprove of."
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"We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for."
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"Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities."
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"Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."
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"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."
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"The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire."
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"Sometimes the most modest changes can bring about enormous effects."
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"...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)"
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"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."
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"We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail."
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