Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me understand something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.

anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.

You have to work very hard behind the scenes, to make a message clear enough for a lot of people to understand.

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

Making noise is easy; making stuff people understand is an easy thing to do.

Maybe I'm just a slow learner or something, but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible.

I will reach out to others and explain why I make the decisions I make.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

Any effort... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality.

Teaching someone that doesn't know something forces you to think about almost every single aspect of it, including parts of it that you could sort of take for granted.

Whatever you want to teach, be brief.

The more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.

If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

For a very great many years, I asked this question: ‘To communicate or not to communicate?’ If one got himself in such thorough trouble by communication, then of course one should stop communicating. But this is not the case. If one gets himself into trouble by communicating, he should further communicate. More communication, not less, is the answer.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

If we go on explaining we shall cease to understand one another.

You should communicate with your other one. Understanding what they are on about is pretty key.

I'm responsible for what I say, but I'm not responsible about how people interpret my situation.