Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell

Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up.

Aviation experts will tell you that it is the success of this war on mitigation as much as anything else that accounts for the extraordinary decline in airline accidents in recent years.

“The Asian system is transparent,” says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist who has closely studied Asian-Western differences. “I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different.

But the differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different—that being good at math may also be rooted in a group’s culture.

“If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy.”

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunities for all.