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My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that," the son of the billionaire investor George Soros has said. "But I remember seeing it as a kid, and thinking, At least half of this is bull. I mean, you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. He literally goes into a spasm, and it's this early warning sign."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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f930e68
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I think overall it's a disadvantage," Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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2b8b567
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If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. "The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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9a6167e
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They lacked something that could have been given to them if we'd only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)
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motivational
genius
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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f3dc5c8
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Of the three, the third trait--the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment--is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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617e15d
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Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan--the architect of Israel's astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War--also wrote an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, "David fought Goliath not with inferior but (on the contrary) with superior weaponry; and his greatness consisted not in his being willing to go out into battle against someone far stronger than he was. But in his knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a ..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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25cc5f5
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The "IQ fundamentalist" Arthur Jensen put it thusly in his 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (p. 113): "The four socially and personally most important threshold regions on the IQ scale are those that differentiate with high probability between persons who, because of their level of general mental ability, can or cannot attend a regular school (about IQ 50), can or cannot master the traditional subject matter of elementary school (about IQ 7..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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61a4c84
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But the Lord said to Samuel, "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." 1 Samuel 16:7"
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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61816de
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It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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615fda2
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The powerful are not as powerful as they seem - nor the weak as weak
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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76aa4f1
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Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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d8c5126
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Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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4f7fc04
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At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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under time pressure, they began to behave just as people do when they are highly aroused. they stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses and fell back on a rigid and unyielding system, a stereotype.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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f64dd7c
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If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the "talented" from the "untalented"; and if you provide the "talented" with a superior experience, then you're going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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3a2d666
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Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let's say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might than the other. How often do you think the bigger side wins? Most of us, I think, would put that number at close to 100 percent. A tenfold difference is a lot. But the actual answer may surprise you. When the political sc..
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large-vs-small-in-war
power-ratio
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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6ede9b7
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You have to be outside the establishment--a foreigner new to the game
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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25ccd43
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Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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0a8ccb3
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The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. "Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people," Spokane told me. "When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another." The Hutterites, obviously, didn't get this idea from conte..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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b470238
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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 underes..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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c50d048
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To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves -- and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day -- dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults -- with the voices of their peers. That..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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dac6c6b
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When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning?
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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9bc7078
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Owe no one anything except to love one another;
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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2a4244d
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The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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5c0e486
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What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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6c8eacd
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We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren't and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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33af392
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All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can't look away one time and scream at him another. You can't treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn't hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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dd2ea8f
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There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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03e017e
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They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten." Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again. The only country we don't see this going on is Denmark. They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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4f38e9b
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The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to ..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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9a40fb2
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But let's not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader and that means you've probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get around reading
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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3b19aaf
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One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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0f7da60
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Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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5ec9c9b
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You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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a4ba3a5
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You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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fc71487
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It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments," Sean MacStiofain, the provisional IRA's first chief of staff, said once, looking back on those early years."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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c3b5a56
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But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do--or don't do--to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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63d2420
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History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized up his opponent long ago in the Valley of Elah. And in a different time and in a very different age,
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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1491dc0
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What are we seeing here? One very real possibility is that these are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting styles that we talked about in the Chris Langan chapter. Think back to Alex Williams, the nine-year-old whom Annette Lareau studied.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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bb77973
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If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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f4e700b
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look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually
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Malcolm Gladwell |