Malcolm Gladwell.
Outliers
Published: Hachette Audio 11/30/2008

Blink
Published: Little Brown and Company 1/31/2005

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference
Publoshed: Back Bay Books 1/31/2002

Articles from
The New York Times

December 15, 2008
Annals of Education
Most Likely to Succeed
ANNALS OF EDUCATION about how to predict performance in teaching and football. On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Don Shonka made his way through a videotape of the Tigers’ previous contest, against…
by Malcolm Gladwell
November 10, 2008
Annals of Business
The Uses of Adversity
ANNALS OF BUSINESS about Sidney Weinberg and Goldman Sachs. Sidney Weinberg was born in 1891, one of eleven children of Pincus Weinberg, a struggling Polish-born liquor wholesaler and bootlegger in Brooklyn. At sixteen, Sidney bluffed himself into a job assisting a janitor at Goldman Sachs brokerage firm, on Wall…
by Malcolm Gladwell
October 20, 2008
Annals of Culture
Late Bloomers
ANNALS OF CULTURE about late bloomers and prodigies. Writer tells about Ben Fountain, who left a position with a Dallas real-estate practice to write fiction. In his first year, he sold two stories, He gained confidence. He wrote a novel, which he ended up putting in a drawer. He…
by Malcolm Gladwell
May 12, 2008
Annals of Innovation
In the Air
ANNALS OF INNOVATION about Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures and the question of whether the insights of inventors can be engineered. Writer uses Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone as an example. Writer describes Nathan Myhrvold meeting the paleontologist Jack Horner on the set of the “Jurassic Park” sequel. They…
by Malcolm Gladwell
December 17, 2007
Books
None of the Above
BOOKS about James Flynn’s “What Is Intelligence?” and the I.Q. race gap. In November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a package containing the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. Flynn found something…
by Malcolm Gladwell
November 12, 2007
Dept. of Criminology
Dangerous Minds
DEPT. OF CRIMINOLOGY about the validity of criminal profiling. Describes the Mad Bomber case in the forties and fifties. Someone calling himself “F.P.” left pipe bombs and angry letters at Con Edison and other locations in New York. In 1956, detectives visited a Freudian psychiatrist named James Brussel, who profiled…
by Malcolm Gladwell
January 08, 2007
Dept. of Public Policy
Open Secrets
DEPT. OF PUBLIC POLICY about the mystery of the Enron debacle. Describes the sentencing of former Enron C.E.O. Jeffrey Skilling on October 23, 2006; he got the maximum sentence of 24 years. National-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden's whereabouts…
by Malcolm Gladwell
January 08, 2007
Dept. of Public Policy
Open Secrets
DEPT. OF PUBLIC POLICY about the mystery of the Enron debacle. Describes the sentencing of former Enron C.E.O. Jeffrey Skilling on October 23, 2006; he got the maximum sentence of 24 years. National-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden's whereabouts…
by Malcolm Gladwell
October 16, 2006
Annals of Entertainment
The Formula
ANNALS OF ENTERTAINMENT about the Epagogix neural-network system, which predicts a screenplay's box-office potential before the movie is made… Writer describes a lunch with Dick Copaken, a movie lover and retired Washington, D.C. lawyer. Copaken goes to two or three movies a week. He discusses the movie “Dear…
by Malcolm Gladwell
September 04, 2006
Comment
No Mercy
COMMENT about discretionary justice toward students. In 1925, a young American physicist was doing graduate work at Cambridge University, in England. Depressed, he decided to dose an apple with noxious chemicals and leave it on the desk of his tutor, Patrick Blackett. School officials found out and put the student…
by Malcolm Gladwell

August 28, 2006
Dept. of Human Resources
The Risk Pool
DEPT. OF HUMAN RESOURCES about pensions… Writer discusses the 1949 contract negotiations between Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers (U.A.W.) and Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors. Wilson offered every G.M. employee health-care benefits and a pension. Reuther had his doubts. The labor movement believed that…
by Malcolm Gladwell
May 29, 2006
Books
Game Theory
BOOKS review of “The Wages of Wins” by David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, and Stacey L. Brooks. The first player picked in the 1996 NBA draft was a slender, 6-foot guard from Georgetown University named Allen Iverson. In every year since 2000, he has been named to the…
by Malcolm Gladwell
May 22, 2006
Profiles
What the Dog Saw [ABSTRACT]
PROFILES of dog psychologist Cesar Millan. In the case of Sugar v. Forman, Cesar Millan knew none of the facts before arriving at the scene of the crime. His job was to reconcile Lynda and Ray Forman, of Mission Hills, California, with their dog, Sugar. Cesar is built like a…
by Malcolm Gladwell
April 10, 2006
Books
Here’s Why
BOOKS review of “Why?” by Charles Tilly… In “Why?” the Columbia University scholar Charles Tilly sets out to make sense of our reason for giving reasons. Tilly seeks to decode the structure of everyday social interaction, and the result is a book that forces readers to reexamine everything from the…
by Malcolm Gladwell
March 06, 2006
Audio
Age Before Beauty
[Audio]
by Malcolm Gladwell
February 13, 2006
Dept. of Social Services
Million-Dollar Murray [ABSTRACT]
DEPT.OF SOCIAL SERVICES about solutions to problems like homelessness, violent police officers and high-polluting cars. All three problems follow a power-law distribution when plotted statistically on a graph… Writer tells about Murray Barr, a homeless alcoholic man in Reno, Nevada. Two local police officers, Steve Johns and Patrick…
by Malcolm Gladwell
February 06, 2006
Annals of Public Policy
Troublemakers
ANNALS OF PUBLIC POLICY about pit bulls and racial profiling. One afternoon last February, Jayden Clairoux, Guy Clairoux's young son, and his wife, JoAnn Hartley, were attacked by three ferocious pit bulls in their neighborhood in Ottawa, Ontario. Five days later, the Ontario legislature banned the ownership of pit bulls…
by Malcolm Gladwell
October 10, 2005
A Critic at Large
Getting In
A CRITIC AT LARGE about Ivy League admissions. The writer describes his application to the University of Toronto. In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that any academically-gifted student who could afford private college had a straightforward…
by Malcolm Gladwell
September 12, 2005
Letter from Saddleback
The Cellular Church
LETTER FROM SADDLEBACK about pastor Rick Warren, author of “The Purpose-Driven Life,” and head of the Saddleback Church, which thrives on a cellular, rather than a congregational structure… Tells about Warren renting out the Anaheim Angels baseball stadium to address the entire congregation of his church… Rick Warren is…
by Malcolm Gladwell
September 05, 2005
Annals of Technology
The Bakeoff [ABSTRACT]
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY about creating the ultimate cookie. Steve Gundrum launched Project Delta last fall. Gundrum runs Mattson, one of the country's foremost food research-and-development (R. & D.) firms, which is located in Silicon Valley. Mattson created Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chip Cookie and many more supermarket products. That evening…
by Malcolm Gladwell

August 29, 2005
Dept. of Public Policy
The Moral-Hazard Myth
DEPT. OF PUBLIC POLICY about the “moral-hazard” theory behind America's failed health-care system. Several years ago, 2 Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, “Uninsured in America.” They talked to as many…
by Malcolm Gladwell
May 16, 2005
Books
Brain Candy
BOOKS review of “Everything Bad is Good For You” by Steven Johnson… Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americans-at least as measured by I.Q. tests-were getting smarter. What on earth is happening? In the wonderfully entertaining “Everything Bad is Good For…
by Malcolm Gladwell
January 03, 2005
Books
The Vanishing
BOOKS lead review of “Collapse” by Jared Diamond… Writer tells about the Norse settlements in Greenland, first founded about a thousand years ago, which died out after four hundred and fifty years… This story is told in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed”… Diamond uses environmental…
by Malcolm Gladwell
December 13, 2004
Annals of Technology
The Picture Problem
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY about mammography, warfare and the limits of photographs and X-rays… Writer discusses the use of the LNATIRN navigation and targeting pod by U.S. fighter pilots in the first Gulf War. The LANTIRN was supposed to help the pilots locate mobile Scud missile launchers at night. After…
by Malcolm Gladwell
November 22, 2004
Annals of Culture
Something Borrowed
ANNALS OF CULTURE about plagiarism in writing and music, particularly the use by playwright Bryony Lavery of material from an article by Malcolm Gladwell … Writer tells about friends of psychologist Dorothy Lewis who had seen Lavery’s play “Frozen” and told her that she should see it. One of the characters…
by Malcolm Gladwell
November 08, 2004
Annals of Psychology
Getting Over It
ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY about Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and changing ideas about emotional resilience in the face of trauma… “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” is about a public relations specialist who lives in the suburbs, works for a media company in…
by Malcolm Gladwell
October 25, 2004
A Critic at Large
High Prices
A CRITIC AT LARGE about prescription drug prices and the pharmaceutical industry… Writer discusses AstraZenaca’s “Shark Fin Project,” an attempt to avoid losing revenue when the patent for their successful heartburn drug Prilosec expired. They created a new drug called Nexium, which was a reengineering of Prilosec and which was…
by Malcolm Gladwell
September 20, 2004
Annals of Psychology
Personality Plus [ABSTRACT]
ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY about personality tests… Writer tells about Alexander (Sandy) Nininger, who was posthumously awarded the first Congressional Medal of Honor in the Second World War for feats of bravery during fighting in Bataan. Writer notes that there was no way to predict that Ninninger would turn into a…
by Malcolm Gladwell
September 06, 2004
Taste Technologies
The Ketchup Conundrum
TASTE TECHNOLOGIES about the World’s Best Ketchup. Years ago, French’s mustard dominated the supermarket shelves. In the early 1970s, the Heublein Company expertly marketed a Dijon mustard called Grey Poupon with sophisticated TV ads and sales leaped 40-50%, proving that the American consumer was willing to pay more as long…
by Malcolm Gladwell
March 15, 2004
Annals of Commerce
The Terrazzo Jungle
ANNALS OF COMMERCE about the evolution of shopping malls. Victor Gruen grew up in prewar Jewish Vienna, studying architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He emigrated to New York in 1938. As M. Jeffrey Hartwick recounts in “Mall Maker,” his new biography, Gruen began designing stores in New…
by Malcolm Gladwell

January 12, 2004
Commerce & Culture
Big and Bad [ABSTRACT]
COMMERCE & CULTURE about the S.U.V. boom and the way drivers conceive of road safety… Writer tells about the 1996 introduction of the Ford Expedition, a full-sized S.U.V. based on the F-150 pickup truck. Describes the different fuel efficiency and body construction requirements for trucks and cars. Tells about…
by Malcolm Gladwell
December 01, 2003
Comment
Institutional Health
Comment about a steroid-abuse scandal in the National Football League (N.F.L.). A few months ago, an anonymous coach sent a vial of clear liquid to the drug-testing laboratory at U.C.L.A., calling it the sporting world’s dirty little secret. The liquid was an anabolic steroid called tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG…
by Malcolm Gladwell
September 15, 2003
Comment
Making the Grade
Signed comment about the Bush administration's new educational reforms... The sweeping federal reforms this fall resemble the industrial-efficiency movement of the early twentieth century, when engineers argued that efficiency could be measured and managed. The "No Child Left Behind" act seeks to compel individual schools to make a hundred…
by Malcolm Gladwell
March 10, 2003
A Critic at Large
Connecting the Dots
A CRITIC AT LARGE review of "The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the F.B.I. and C.I.A. Failed to Stop It" (Hyperion; $24.95) by John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell... Tells about the failure of Israeli intelligence to determine that Egypt and Syria were going to attack…
by Malcolm Gladwell
December 23, 2002
Comment
The Politics of Politesse
Signed comment about a recent Presidential niceness trend... After Carter, the trend line starts to move upward: we had the abundantly genial Ronald Reagan, with his jars of jelly beans; George H.W. Bush, the master of the handwritten thank-you note; and Bill Clinton, the most charming and prolix Presidential…
by Malcolm Gladwell
December 02, 2002
Books
Group Think
BOOKS lead review of "Live from New York" (Little, Brown; $25.95) by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller; “The Lunar Men” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30) by Jenny Uglow; “A Great Silly Grin” (Public Affairs; $27.50) by Humphrey Carpenter…
by Malcolm Gladwell
August 12, 2002
Books
Political Heat
BOOKS lead review of "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago" (Chicago; $27.50) by Eric Klinenberg... The subject of the book is the July, 1995 heat wave that lasted for a long week... As the air mass settled on the city, cars began to overheat and stall…
by Malcolm Gladwell
August 05, 2002
Annals of Psychology
The Naked Face [ABSTRACT]
ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY about reading people’s facial expressions. Some years ago, John Yarbrough was working patrol for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It was about two in the morning. He and his partner approached a parked car and, suddenly, a man jumped out of the passenger side and pointed…
by Malcolm Gladwell
July 22, 2002
Dept. of Human Resources
The Talent Myth
DEPT. OF HUMAN RESOURCES about the corporate culture at Enron, and how it was affected by advisors from McKinsey & Company... In the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars, and, in the past few years, this message has been preached by consultants and management gurus…
by Malcolm Gladwell
May 27, 2002
A Critic at Large
The Televisionary
A CRITIC AT LARGE about new biographies of the inventor of television, Philo T. Farnsworth... Farnsworth’s business nemesis [David] Sarnoff of RCA lived in an enormous Upper East Side mansion and smoked fat cigars and travelled by chauffeured limousine. Sarnoff’s top television researcher was Vladimir Zworykin, the scion of a…
by Malcolm

April 22, 2002
Dept. of Finance
Blowing Up [ABSTRACT]
DEPT. OF FINANCE about Wall Street analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb... Writer describes a visit Taleb made to the lavish estate of money manager Victor Niederhoffer... Niederhoffer had a huge and eclectic library and a seemingly insatiable desire for knowledge... There was just one problem, however, and it is the key…
by Malcolm Gladwell
March 25, 2002
Books
The Social Life of Paper
BOOKS lead review of "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (M.I.T.; $24.95) by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper; and "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age" (Arcade; $24.95) by David M. Levy... Writer describes air-traffic control, which depends on computers and radar. It also…
by Malcolm Gladwell
December 17, 2001
A Critic at Large
Examined Life
A CRITIC AT LARGE about Stanley H. Kaplan and his business of preparing students for the Scholastic Aptitude Test… In 1946, a high-school junior named Elizabeth, from Coney Island, came to him for help on an exam he was unfamiliar with. It was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test…
by Malcolm Gladwell
November 26, 2001
Annals of Technology
Smaller [ABSTRACT]
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY about the evolution of disposable diapers… Writer dissects the Huggies Untratrim disposable diaper… Writer describes quality control at the Kimberly-Clark plant in Wisconsin where Huggies are made… Tells about Moore’s Law which predicted that the number of transistors that engineers could fit onto a microchip would…
by Malcolm Gladwell
October 29, 2001
Contagions
The Scourge You Know
Signed talk story about influenza… Writer describes how difficult it is to use anthrax as a biological weapon, and how easy it is to counter smallpox… Writer suggests that the best possible thing to worry about is the influenza virus, which routinely kills tens of thousands of Americans every year…
by Malcolm Gladwell
September 17, 2001
Comment
Operation Rescue
Signed comment about American teen-pregnancy rates and sex education... Writer briefly discusses engineering improvements in cars which have led to lower injury rates in accidents… Suppose… that, instead of focussing on the legality of abortion, we focussed on the number of abortions in this country. That’s the kind of…
by Malcolm Gladwell
September 10, 2001
The Sporting Scene
Drugstore Athlete [ABSTRACT]
THE SPORTING SCENE about the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes… Tells about East German swimmer Christiane Knacke-Sommer, who won a bronze medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics… Tells about a new book on the East German sports establishment, "Faust’s Gold," by Steven Ungerleider… Anabolic steroids have been…
by Malcolm Gladwell
July 30, 2001
Dept. of Motor Vehicles
Free Lizzie!
Signed talk story explaining how an incident involving the injury of sixteen people on a sidewalk could’ve been an accident... In the early morning of July 7th, thirty-year-old publicist Lizzie Grubman backed her father’s brand-new Mercedes-Benz S.U.V. into a crowd outside a Southampton night club, injuring…
by Malcolm Gladwell
July 16, 2001
Books
Super Friends
BOOKS lead review of "A Passion to Win" (Simon & Schuster; $26) by Sumner Redstone with Peter Knobler... [It] is an account of a man’s rise to the top of a multibillion-dollar media empire... But mostly it is a story about the value of friendship, about how very, very…
by Malcolm Gladwell
July 02, 2001
Annals of Public Health
The Mosquito Killer [ABSTRACT]
ANNALS OF PUBLIC HEALTH about Fred Soper, DDT, and malaria eradication efforts… Describes the discovery in the late nineteen-thirties of DDT by chemist Paul Müller for the J.R. Geigy company, in Switzerland… Describes how typhus and malaria were devastating American troops overseas during the Second World War… Under conditions…
by Malcolm Gladwell

What is Success?
Monica Davis

"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing." Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865) "It is possible to fail in many ways...while to succeed is possible only in one way." Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) "The person who makes a success of living is the one who see his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. That is dedication." Cecil B. DeMille (1881 - 1959) Success has been pondered upon for centuries in the past and for centuries to come. From BC to AD there is still a search for a definition to the word success. How do you measure success? Can you physically lay it out and determine its length with a ruler? Can you pour it in a beaker and mark off a point of volume? Can you put on a scale and give a weight? The problem with figuring out who is really successful is determining what factors it should mostly be based on.
Success is such an abstract word that there is some difficulty in trying to explain the meaning of it. Seemingly, a word like success can be defined by explaining what it is as well as what it is not. To be successful you need to have an idea of what the word means. For some civilizations it is how long you are remembered and for others it is how much you have in the bank.
Success can be described in many different ways which make it confusing to determine who is successful or not. Often people think success is all about the money, while failing to look at other aspects of the word and the road it takes to get there. It can be interchanged with accomplished or prosperous, but neither of those words quite brings about the feeling as the actual word success. Success should be described by its background. The journey it took to get to that high position. Being successful can be looked at as having a couple of components contributing to the ladder you climb to be recognized as a successful person.
They say success is wealth and acclaim, but success is not based on money. Although, sometimes it does come with those things, it's not what it is always perceived to be. Universally wealth is a number one part of being successful, however having a million dollars does not make a person successful. Everyone would like to be rich, but it is not the defining factor of success. If a kid wants to become a drug lord and becomes it then he is successful. He’s rich isn’t he? So would he be considered a successful man?
To be successful there must first be a goal to reach. If a person does not want to be anything in life then he cannot be successful. There has to be something to work towards to realize the point of success. All effort has to be directed to this goal if it really means something. Sacrifices are made for this, risks are taken, and knowledge has to be gained in the process. When you are persistent in hard work, adrenaline can only be added to keep the progression going until the end of the road. When X marks the spot the arrow should be aimed directly at it, and when goal marks the spot, the aim should be directed at it. If you have no goal to set or reach, you cannot be successful. Think of this as playing soccer. If there is no goal to kick the ball into, what is the point of playing the game? There can be no winner. So, with no goal in the game of life there won’t be any success.
Determination and motivation are other aspects of being successful. If a person does not want something it will not be. Sometimes by chance or luck you might get your big break, but with no will to proceed the buck stops at some point. In order to be determined to reach a goal, something has to give you motivation. There has to be a force that drives the passion to make you strive for what you want. A self investment has to be made when no one else will contribute to the assertion to keep you going. Influences of your surroundings can make you want to be more than what you see. When you look at what a person has come from and where he is now, so much can be learned. A rich person is a rich person. But a rich person who does something, one that is determined and motivated to do something is a successful rich person.

A successful person is a leader that clearly has self-confidence and has their head held up high. It involves holding a position of prestige in whatever the field of work chosen. Soaring well beyond the normal standards and not settling for anything less than what you want to show what you are all about. Lazy people are not the ones at the top of their game; and if they some how get there, they won't stay there for long. Star quality makes a person successful. You are not expected to fall off the bandwagon as a leader. This has to be worked on. Leaders were once followers at some point, but successful followers become leaders.
Take Fantasia for example. She was given a big break by American Idol, but still it took so much determination to get as big as she has gotten. She loved to sing and set forth for her American Idol audition with a goal in mind. She made many sacrifices, learned the music business, and earned her respect. She had confidence in herself to know that she was something. She looked at the unfulfilled life she was living and was motivated to do something to get out of it. She pulled herself by her boot straps and made the first step, which led to the next step, which led her to success.
Everyone would like to be successful one day, but in order to be successful you have to have a clear vision of the idea and work towards it. Success is the determination to attain the telos of the goal set before you. Wealth can be attained through inheritance, but to be successful there has to be work involved. Determination has to be put into action. The ultimate strive of success should be happiness. It involves goals, motivation, determination, and leadership skills that lead to being happy. "He who met or accomplished gratifying results as an active player in the game we call life has given the word success meaning." Monica Davis