Outliers

Aug 12, 2024

Malcolm Gladwell

INTRODUCTION

In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease.
No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.

In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work.
This is not a book about tall trees. It’s a book about forests—
But these exact same biases also show up in areas of much more consequence, like education.
Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”
He started out just a little bit better.

It 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.
You have to have parents who encourage and support you.
Gates’s father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle, and his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do banker.
Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968.
They gave Bill Gates extra time to practice.
But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.
You’re in no position to give up a good job and pension for some pie-in-the-sky $ 397 computer kit.
It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

Intelligence has a threshold.
Knowledge of a law student’s test scores is of little help if you are faced with a classroom of clever law students.
Nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses.

It’s because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.
It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.
The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way.
But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages.
His childhood was the embodiment of concerted cultivation.
In the end, only one thing mattered: family background.
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.

Successful people don’t do it alone.
They’re products of particular places and environments.
The most devastating events of the twentieth century hit you at exactly the wrong time.
The same dynamic benefited the members of that generation when they went off to college.
Mort Janklow went to Columbia University Law School, because demographic trough babies have their pick of selective schools.
It was like showing up in Silicon Valley in 1986 with ten thousand hours of computer programming already under your belt.
It wasn’t just that it was growing by leaps and bounds. It was also explicitly entrepreneurial.
Success is not a random act.
Their world—their culture and generation and family history—gave them the greatest of opportunities.

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 behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.*

“Look, no American pilot would put up with that. That’s the thing,” Ratwatte said. “They would say, ‘Listen, buddy. I have to land.’ ”
America is a classic low–power distance culture.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children.
Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out.
But a belief in work ought to be a thing of beauty.
All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work.

What KIPP is most famous for is mathematics.
Schools work.
Students in Asian schools don’t have long summer vacations.
It seems counterintuitive but we do things at a slower pace and as a result we get through a lot more.
Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for.
Someone brought a little bit of the rice paddy to the South Bronx and explained to her the miracle of meaningful work.