What It's About

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Brilliant and entertaining,

Outliers

is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

My Thoughts

I loved that the book pointed out and enlightened me regarding observed patterns amongst outliers (outstandingly successful people).

Although, in situations highlighted where people might be disadvantaged for success no particular solution was pointed out for those category of people.

I also highlighted a couple of things I should pay attention to in the upbringing of my brother

Notes

What’s in it for me? Learn why “self-made” success is a myth

When it comes to success stories, we like to think that the people in question have earned their success through talent and hard work. It’s a myth of a self-made man. There are many unseen factors that influence a person’s success, and most of them lie beyond that person’s control.

Our culture celebrates the myth of the “self-made man.”

We naturally tend to attribute an individual’s success or achievement to his or her own efforts and innate abilities.

We place such a high value on individuals and theory self-made achievements that we often willfully ignore other factors. The self-made man is a myth, a very, very popular myth.

Once you reach a certain threshold, increased abilities no longer help you succeed.

Once you reach a certain threshold, increased abilities no longer helps you succeed. Once you’ve reached the skills threshold, marginal increases in innate reasoning abilities won’t advance you. Other things, social skills, connections, or even a lucky break, will.

World-class mastery of anything demands around 10,000 hours of practice - no easy feat.

Talent is certainly a key ingredient in the recipe for success, hard work seems to be at least as important, if not more so.

Bill Gates spent a lot of time learning computer programming.

To achieve world class mastery at anything, studies show you need to spend a critical minimum amount of time practicing something. Of course, not everyone has the opportunity to spend this much time practicing something. First of all, you need the opportunity to start early so you can get in as much practice as possible and secure a head start on the competition.

Also, you or your family has to have the resources to support you. Encouragement from family or friends, coaches, teachers, and kind strangers you meet on the street helps too.

If you're lucky, like Bill Gates or the Beatles, you'll have all these things. However, many people don't, so they effectively lack the opportunity to achieve world class mastery in their chosen fields.

The month you’re born in can have a huge effect on what you achieve.

The month you’re born in can have a huge effect on what you achieve. Your relative age, how old you are in comparison to others in a developmental group, can make or break you.

A year makes a big difference when it constitutes one-eight of your life.

Relative age can create unequal opportunities in any area that uses annual cutoff dates to divide people into age-based groups. Most sports leagues have them.

How you’re brought up can radically impact how successful you become.

After you reach a skills threshold, natural abilities stop mattering in your quest for success. A far more important factor is whether you have practical intelligence.

Practical intelligence is procedural knowledge, knowing how to interpret and work social situations to get what you want. In other words, knowing who to ask what and when. The ability to interact with and negotiate with authority figures can help inch people closer to their goals.

Sociologist Annette Leroux found that wealthier parents instill in their children a feeling of entitlement more often than lower class parents do. In general, they do this by paying more attention to their children, or at least by providing their children with enriching activities that promote intellectual growth.

They teach their children to demand respect and to customize a situation to suit their needs.

In other words, they teach their children practical intelligence. By contrast, poorer parents are often intimidated by authority and let their children follow a pattern of natural growth. There’re less pushing, prodding, and encouraging than in wealthier families. This means children from poorer households are less likely to be taught practical intelligence, which radically decreases their chances for success.

The year you’re born in can make or break you.

Unfair advantages in life come from very unlikely sources. Consider several big name software billionaires, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy. All of them were born with an extraordinary gift for logical reasoning, as well as ambition, practical intelligence, and opportunities to practice their skills. Mystery of the wildly successful solved? Not so fast. It's not just that they had opportunities. It's that they had a precise series of opportunities that let them get their 10,000 hours of computer programming practice in at exactly the right time in history. In order to capitalize on the rapidly changing software industry, they had to be born at just the right time. Late enough to have access to a new computer model that made it easier to work out programming bugs, but not so late that others could get to their ideas first. They also had to be just the right age when starting their companies. If they had been much older, they might have been more interested in settling down rather than in taking huge risks that allowed them to succeed. Not every successful software tycoon was born in the years between 1954 and 1956. But the fact that many were, suggests that being in the right place at the right time matters.

Where you come from — geographically and culturally — can have a particularly large effect on what you achieve.

You’re probably familiar with the streotype that Asian are good at math. When children learn the words for numbers in Asian languages, they automatically learn to add up numbers too, thus developing their mathematical aptitude earlier on. In addition to language, rice, the staple of the Asian diet also helps students learn math because rice farming fosters an intense work ethic. As a result, a culture of hard work developed.

If we recognize the importance of cultural legacy, we can help more people work towards success — and prevent failure.

An example is Korean Air, an airline that before the year 2000 had a terrible safety record.

The culture values authority figures and dictates that one should always defer to an individual with a higher rank. Thus, if the captain of a plane makes a mistake, lower ranking crew members might not be comfortable correcting the captain because their cultural legacy says they shouldn't.

After a reform that acknowledged the problems the Korean cultural legacy of hierarchy could pose for flying a plane, Korean Air hired an American firm to improve its flight crew's communication skills. Now, its safety record matches those of its competitors.

If we recognize the reasons behind uneven playing fields, we can create more opportunities for people to succeed.

In hockey, annual cutoff date mean juniors born late in the year must play against kids almost a year older than they are.

Many hockey players who might have harnessed great work ethics or learned to handle the puck better than anyone else in the league are lost, because resources go the those who have an unfair advantage by having been born in the right part of the year.

Final Summary

The key message is that no man, woman is an island.

Extraordinary success is the result of an often unlikely series of opportunities, lucky breaks, and occurrences that combine to create the precise conditions that allow such achievement.