Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell

We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It’s something, at least in par...

But social savvy is knowledge.

It’s a set of skills that have to be learned.

That cannot be find in genes or is not an innate

It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and ...

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates.

That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children.

Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style “concerted cultivation.”

Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth.” They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own. Lareau stresses that one style isn’t morally better than the other.

concerted cultivation has enormous advantages.

In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of “entitlement.

“They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings.

“Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They

“I’m not ten.” That’s entitlement: his mother permits that casual incivility because she wants him to learn to assert himself with people in positions of authority.

It is important to understand where the particular mastery of that moment comes from. It’s not genetic.

This is the advantage that Oppenheimer had and that Chris Langan lacked.

when chris langan was in colege he was was not inquisitive innately so.he.would just sit in the class without asking any questions And when his mother failed to understand the formalities of the scholarship form he lost the reed college

Oppenheimer was raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, the son of an artist and a successful garment manufacturer. His

concerted cult...

To make your kid inquisitive in nature and to train your kid in such a way that the kid stays comfortably with other than parents

“infused with the notion that they were being groomed to reform the world.”

When his math teacher realized he was bored, she sent him off to do independent work.

Oppenheimer’s parents responded to their son’s hobby in an almost textbook example of concerted cultivation:

Chris Langan, by contrast, had only the bleakness of Bozeman, and a home dominated by an angry, drunken stepfather. “[Jack] Langan did this to all of us,” said Mark. “We all have a true resentment of authority.” That was the lesson Langan learned from his childhood: distrust authority and be independent. He never had a parent teach him on the way to the doctor how to speak up for himself, or how to reason and negotiate with those in positions of authority. He didn’t learn entitlement. He learned constraint. It may seem like a small thing, but it was a crippling handicap in navigating the world beyond Bozeman.

“If Christopher had been born into a wealthy family, if he was the son of a doctor who was well connected in some major market, I guarantee you he would have been one of those guys you read about, knocking back PhDs at seventeen,”

“It’s the culture you find yourself in that determines that.

The As were judged to be much more alert, poised, attractive, and well dressed.

Not something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains.

They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world. The Cs were squandered talent. But they didn’t need to be.

“To get a job [students] should be long enough on family connections, long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these.

“It’s not that those guys were smarter lawyers than anyone else,” Rifkind says. “It’s that they had a skill that they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable.”

“But as a garment worker, you were closer to the center of the industry.

you are working in a field in California, you have no clue what’s happening to the produce when it gets on the truck.

And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets.

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.

I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take?

But he was ecstatic, because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him.

Bill Gates had that same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside. And the Beatles didn’t recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week.

They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it ...

Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around t...

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

Farmers also don’t have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can’t easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own.

But a herdsman does have to worry.

He’s under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challeng...

In the backcountry, violence wasn’t for economic gain. It was personal. You fought over your honor.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces.

They have deep roots and long lives.

They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behav...

So far in Outliers we’ve seen that 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 mak...

The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the

Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error.