Wisdom of Malcolm Gladwell - The Scotsman

Wisdom of Malcolm Gladwell - The Scotsman
Wisdom of Malcolm Gladwell


Published Date: 01 June 2009
The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.
If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.

There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' If you have no experience then your instincts aren't any good.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor. People who are busy doing things – as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops – don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organise their experiences and make sense of them.

What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.