No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
Malcolm GladwellRead
Shallow communities are relatively easy to build.
Interpretation
Building superficial connections is simple, but meaningful communities take more effort.
Malcolm Gladwell's quote highlights that while it is easy to create a community with shallow ties among its members, genuine, deep connections that foster a strong, resilient community require more work and commitment. This speaks to the essence of what makes relationships meaningful and lasting, suggesting that quality trumps quantity in communal bonds.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about building stronger neighborhoods.
No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
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.
We figured out as a community of gay people, we have to take care of our own.
We need better neighbors, neighbors that care about the schools in their neighborhood whether they have kids in them or not, because they know that the health and vitality of that neighborhood depends on it.
Whatever community organization, whether it's a women's organization, or fighting for racial justice ... you will get satisfaction out of doing something to give back to the community that you never get in any other way.
I'm building shopping centers and movie theaters in the inner cities. So that means supplying jobs and letting blacks understand that we have to build our communities back, not looking to anybody else.
It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.
Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.
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