No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
Malcolm GladwellRead
Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way...We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Understanding our feelings and decisions requires not only expressing them but also being ready to explain their origins.
Malcolm Gladwell's quote emphasizes the complexity of human understanding. It suggests that in a world that demands justification for our feelings and decisions, we must acknowledge that some knowledge or intuition may exist outside of conscious reasoning. Sometimes, it is not necessary to dissect our emotions or instincts; accepting them as they are can lead to a more profound appreciation of our experiences.
Themes
FeelingsDecisionsKnowledgeIntuitionElaboration
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about decision-making in personal relationships.
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.
Malcolm GladwellRead
The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
Malcolm GladwellRead
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.
Malcolm GladwellRead
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.
Malcolm GladwellRead
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.
Malcolm GladwellRead
Similar quotes
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
Thomas SowellRead
The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.
George A. SheehanRead
'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
Frank Lloyd WrightRead
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.
John Stuart MillRead
The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.
Os GuinnessRead
I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.
Elias CanettiRead