No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
Malcolm GladwellRead
The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We have the power to influence our first impressions, even if they originate from our unconscious mind.
Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes that while our initial perceptions may arise from subconscious processes, we are not powerless in managing these impressions. The idea suggests that awareness and conscious effort can empower us to change or challenge the automatic judgments formed by our mind.
Themes
ImpressionsControlConsciousnessSubconsciousPerception
In practice
Example use cases
In a workshop on self-awareness, this quote can illustrate the importance of understanding our unconscious biases.
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
We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the blame, none has the praise.
Swami VivekanandaRead
Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.
William Ellery ChanningRead
Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.
Eckhart TolleRead
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed to the empty. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury—have always seemed to me contemptible.
Albert EinsteinRead
They think old people are lame. But they're not. They're awesome, & I know exactly why I think so. It's because they've lived entire lifetimes. Loved. Laughed. Surrendered. Stumbled. Weathered, beaten, still they don't crumble, not even as they inch toward death.
Ellen HopkinsRead
Greatness can be captured in one word: lifestyle. Life is God's gift to you, style is what you make of it.
Mae JemisonRead