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Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act--and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment--are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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c6439a9
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Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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534e4f4
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Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic be..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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517a27f
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The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any 'naturals,' musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any 'grinds,' people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't 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 t..
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success
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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8fc7f7e
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We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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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'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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a259de9
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That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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that made the unfamiliar familiar.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau, copyright 2003 Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press; "Intercultural Communication in Cognitive Values: Americans and Koreans, by Ho-min Sohn, University of Hawaii Pre..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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ca979bc
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In the end, Tipping Points are the reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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ab5ec9a
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That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren't much good until late in their careers.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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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.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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Biologists often talk about the "ecology" of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about th..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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9217a42
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You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him," he says. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to execute what in pitchman's parlance is called "the turn" -- the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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be04ce0
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My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person--Jacob--who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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That's not because journalists know more about Japan. It's because they knew less: they had the ability to sort through what they knew and find a pattern.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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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. Ecclesiastes
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it's the biggest nine-and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulative advantage."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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1d01ecf
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So what does correlate with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate-at every variety of monkey and ape-the larger their neocortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering a..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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fa8e11a
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To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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potatoes, melons, and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent, and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Ba..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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799697e
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To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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cdecef8
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The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.
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knowing
thinking
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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25afb80
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Two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. Th..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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Gosh darn it," Gau said, "if you don't try, you'll never succeed." 10."
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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Washington in 1965. We instinctively measure advantage in terms of the three M's because men, money, and materiel are the easiest and most obvious ways to make sense of a battle. The only way to appreciate the threat that the Viet Cong posed was to actually listen to what they had to say--to look past the armor and see the man. The book you have just read has tried to persuade you to think that way. Men, money, and materiel aren't always th..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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Achievement is talent plus preparation.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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though she isn't stupid at all. "Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can't seem to learn to think in this manner." 5. Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called "relative deprivation," a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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06a5205
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soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps. On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in a..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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There isn't one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students. Some kids cheat at home but not at school; some kids cheat at school but not at home. Whether or not a child cheated on, say, the word completion test was not an iron-clad predictor of whether he or she would cheat on, say, the underlining A's part of the speed test. If you gave the same group of kids the same test, under the same circumstances s..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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784802e
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But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries--all Goliaths--too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages. They don't, of course.
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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cbc495b
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In recent years, for example, there has been much interest in the idea that one of the most fundamental factors in explaining personality is birth order: older siblings are domineering and conservative, younger siblings more creative and rebellious. When psychologists actually try to verify this claim, however, their answers sound like the Hartshorne and May conclusions. We do reflect the influences of birth order but, as the psychologist J..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle's ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursue..
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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d80feef
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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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racism
subconscious-racism
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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a275d18
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There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. [...] The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters
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Malcolm Gladwell |
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838dbfb
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We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is--and the definition isn't right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disa..
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Malcolm Gladwell |