No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading enhances understanding, and when it's taken away, we learn to pay attention and listen more closely.
Malcolm Gladwell's quote emphasizes the importance of both reading and listening in the learning process. By suggesting that taking away the ability to read can cultivate a stronger skill in listening, he highlights how different forms of communication can cultivate our understanding and perceptions. This reflects a deeper connection between various modes of learning, where one enhances the other, revealing the value of active listening as a critical skill in a world often dominated by reading and written communication.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion, one might say, 'As Malcolm Gladwell points out, if you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening, which is vital for understanding different perspectives.'
More from Malcolm Gladwell
All quotes →People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.
The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this drives me crazy. Why can't there be a stairway? At least make it as easy to exercise as it is to not exercise. It's in society's interest for me to take the stairs.
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.
Similar quotes
To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Play is the work of childhood.
How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
Let not a single day pass without your learning a verse, half a verse, or a fourth of it, or even one letter of it; nor without attending to charity, study and other pious activity.