"No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."
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Malcolm Gladwell quotes (page 3 of 16)
304 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience; experience leads to proficiency; and the more proficient you are the more valuable you'll be."
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"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."
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"Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me."
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"What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?"
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"Achievement is talent plus preparation"
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"In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours."
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"When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters-first and foremost-how they behave."
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"The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."
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"Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all."
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"What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily."
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"If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’."
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"The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost."
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"We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future."
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"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 than everyone else. They work much, much harder."
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"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."
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"We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all."
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"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. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work."
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"Working really hard is what successful people do."
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"The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street."
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