Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers (2008)

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To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success — the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history — with a society that provides opportunities for all.

Malcolm Gladwell
The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

Malcolm Gladwell
It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's 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. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call accumulative advantage.

Malcolm Gladwell
In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

Malcolm Gladwell
The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.

Malcolm Gladwell
It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. 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.

Malcolm Gladwell
The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. 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 make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up.

Malcolm Gladwell
We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.

Malcolm Gladwell
Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Malcolm Gladwell
It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us.

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

Malcolm Gladwell
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." To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

Malcolm Gladwell
Those three things — autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward — are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Malcolm Gladwell
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

Malcolm Gladwell
Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

Malcolm Gladwell
It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.

Malcolm Gladwell
We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try.

Malcolm Gladwell
Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.

Malcolm Gladwell
We overlook just how large a role we all play — and by 'we' I mean society — in determining who makes it and who doesn't.

Malcolm Gladwell
Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback.

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

Malcolm Gladwell
The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.

Malcolm Gladwell
Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

Malcolm Gladwell
My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.

Malcolm Gladwell
No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.

Malcolm Gladwell
To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what's ten years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.

Malcolm Gladwell
It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.

Malcolm Gladwell
Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.

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

Malcolm Gladwell
I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing.... It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

Malcolm Gladwell