Malcolm Gladwell Quotes - Page 9

It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.

I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?

People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.

I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.

David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - "The Sports Gene" - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an "all-star challenge" on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decathlon.

What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.

I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories... If you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual.

Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.

The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.

Jenny Simpson loses her shoe in the women's fifteen hundred, with a lap and a half to go, destroying her chances to repeat as world champion, and she gives the most gracious interview afterward about how she's had a wonderful career already. Great for Jenny Simpson. Bad for the sport! We need drama!

Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?

When I see someone who reads something of mine and draws something out of it that's very different from my perspective, I think that's actually cool. Sometimes it's worrisome when you feel they badly misinterpret it, but it just says that they're thinking, and they're bringing their own interpretation to bear on it. [...] That's part of the wonderful thing about putting words into the world, and if I was worried about that, I couldn't be a writer.

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.

I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.

We can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

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 make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up.

Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs.

..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.

Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

We vary greatly in the natural advantages that we've been given. The world's not fair

For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.