Malcolm Gladwell

Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation

The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.

Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.

... forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish.

A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive - and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down. - Chapter 8

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

We have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious about what also can be good about large classes. It__ a strange thing isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning.

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.

The power of positive thinking will overcome so many things

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive _ and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.

Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the __ork_ 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.

We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean

. . . I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. 'After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute conviction, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision,"' psychologist Joshua Aronson says. 'But how on earth could she know that? What my [and others] research . . . show[s] is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say "I don't know" more often.

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.

The striking thing about Ericsson__ study is that he and his colleagues couldn__ find any __aturals,_ musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any __rinds,_ people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn__ have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that 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__ it. And what__ more, the people at the very top don__ work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. The idea that excellence at a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of excellence. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

Hard world is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.