Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell

People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage.

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.

success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages: when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were all make a significant difference in how well you do in the world.

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