Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell

They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded.

They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.

they had to get them to realize that they wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation.

They had to look beyond the individual.

the story line is always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness.

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.

But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and ...

It makes a difference where and whe...

the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.

They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten.”

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.

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

Achievement is talent plus preparation.

the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

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

Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.

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

You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough.

This is where Michigan came in, because Michigan was one of the first universities in the world to switch over to time-sharing.

Opportunity number one was that Gates got sent to Lakeside. How many high schools in the world had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968?

Opportunity number two was that the mothers of Lakeside had enough money to pay for the school’s computer fees.

Number three was that, when that money ran out, one of the parents happened to work at C-Cubed, which happened to need someone to check its code on the weekends, and which also happened not to care if weekends turned into weeknights. Number four was that Gates just happened to find out abou...

Number five was that Gates happened to live within walking distance of the Un...

Number six was that the university happened to have free computer time between thre...

Number seven was that TRW happened to cal...

Number eight was that the best programmers Pembroke knew for that particular problem happ...

And number nine was that Lakeside was willing to let those kids spend their spring term...

They gave Bill Gates extra time to practice.

But they also were given an extraordinary opportunity, in the same way that hockey and soccer players born in January, February, and March are given an extraordinary opportunity.*

“You had this multibillion-dollar company making mainframes, and if you were part of that, you’d think, Why screw around

pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple.

“There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals,” Terman once said.

Geniuses are the ultimate outliers.

Terman didn’t understand what a real outlier was, and that’s a mistake we continue to make to this day.

One of the most widely used intelligence tests is something called Raven’s Progressive Matrices.

player who is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter.

To be a Nobel Prize winner, apparently, you have to be smart enough to get into a college at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois.

Harvard isn’t selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the “uses of a brick” test — and maybe “uses of a brick” is a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability.

universities are institutions structured, in large part, for people with his kind of deep intellectual interests and curiosity.

problem that imperils his college career.

Chris langan's problem was that he could not go to college and the robert's problem was depression amd.hatred

Langan’s mother has missed a deadline for his financial aid. Oppenheimer has tried to poison his tutor.

Langan gets his scholarship taken away, and Oppenheimer gets sen...

“He was a very impractical fellow,” one of Oppenheimer’s friends later said.

because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

and what the prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In fact — and this is the most heartbreaking part of all — he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor. The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence.”

it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other.

You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence, or — as in the lucky case of someone like Robert Oppenheimer — you can have lots of both.