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a295842
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All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we're deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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c6576fd
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I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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To play by David's rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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14a8650
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The three rules of the Tipping Point--the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context--offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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0d346ca
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We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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e4241d6
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Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $1..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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78214f5
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Working really hard is what successful people do,
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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3207ca4
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a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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a46b965
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It was an admission of defeat. ... He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how. He couldn't even talk to his calculus teacher, for goodness' sake. These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one--not even rock sta..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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1d05a85
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Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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853d944
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Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure--and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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d1f99cc
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If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way--who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites--it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when yo..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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22fe28c
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The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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6204325
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There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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4bdd6e8
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I mean, it's ridiculous," Dhuey says. "It's outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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9902171
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When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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c4a4a18
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Taleb likes to invoke Popper: 'No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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aabe1b4
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They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? "Mary got a quarter," Friedman says. "There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket." ... and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a bu..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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But the problem was, Sacks wasn't comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country--and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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2d40df9
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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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Malcolm Gladwell |
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1d96f96
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concerted cultivation. He gets taken to museums and gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp, where he takes classes. When he's bored at home, there are plenty of books to read, and his parents see it as their responsibility to keep him actively engaged in the world around him. It's not hard to see how Alex would get better at reading and math over the summer.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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b007769
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a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people--Salesmen--with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups. Who
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it's the other way around.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of "stickiness."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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afb2113
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Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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6170113
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Testers for 7-Up consistently found consumers would report more lemon flavor in their product if they added 15% more yellow coloring TO THE PACKAGE.
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packaging
senses
marketing
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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819d135
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The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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e533709
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The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called--appropriately enough--the "Big Fish-Little Pond Effect." The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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6dc78e3
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Of course, kids don't always like repetition. Whatever they are watching has to be complex enough to allow, upon repeated exposure, for deeper and deeper levels of comprehension. At the same time, it can't be so complex that the first time around it baffles the children and turns them off.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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9c18ac5
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We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas,.....
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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1bde40e
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What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a "unified" trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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c43a780
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Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people. Stories about older people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving older p..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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a6b491f
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Those three things -- autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward -- are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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a44c387
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According to research done by Mitchell Chang of the University of California, the likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree--all things being equal--rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university's average SAT score.4 The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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27bb263
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Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent ..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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f67cdd2
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People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. 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.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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80f4c11
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Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major," they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don't."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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f5345c7
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In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more--which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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aadd0ee
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In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. 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.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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090aa7a
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If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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d52b70a
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the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice,
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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5bff655
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Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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f461f74
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It's challenging, it's not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.
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Malcolm Gladwell |