Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell

the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health.

In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage.

It makes a difference where and when we grew up.

phenomenon of relative age.

is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”

We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

We could easily take control of the machinery of achievement, in other words — not just in sports but, as we will see, in other more consequential areas as well. But we don’t. And why? Because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.

the ingredients of success at the highest level: passion, talent, and hard work.

was a story of how the outliers in a particular field reached their lofty status through a combination of ability, opportunity, and utterly arbitrary advantage.

is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes.

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.

The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise.

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything,”

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.

the Beatles, one of the most famous rock bands ever; and Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men.

“that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”

practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It

general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other.

He’d had to make his way alone, and no one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.

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.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.

Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities,

“NO ONE WHO CAN RISE BEFORE DAWN THREE HUNDRED SIXTY DAYS A YEAR FAILS TO MAKE HIS FAMILY RICH.”

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

“There’s a will to make sense that drives what she does,”

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.