OUTLIERS

The story of success

MALCOM
GLADWELL
 Part ONE:

OPPORTUNITY
 Chapter one: The Matthew effect
“ For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But
from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”

• Outlier: A place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules
did not apply.

• Successful people 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. The culture we belong and the legacies
passed down by our forebears shapes the patterns of our achievements in ways
we cannot begin to imagine.

• We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know
enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down
the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?
 Chapter one: The Matthew effect
“ For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But
from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”

• The Matthew effect: Those who are successful are more likely to be given
the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. Success is the
result of the “Accumulative advantage”: People start out a little bit
better than others. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes
that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity,
which makes the initially small difference bigger still-and on and on until the
person is a genuine outlier.
 Chapter two: The 10 000 – Hour rule
“ In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours”

• Outliers reach their lofty status through a combination of ability, opportunity,

and utterly arbitrary advantage.

• Achievement is talent plus preparation. “The emerging picture is that ten

thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery
associated with being a world class expert – in anything”. It seems that it takes
the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to achieve true mastery. 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.

• All the outliers are the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity.
 Chapter two: The 10 000 – Hour rule
“ In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours”

• People who are given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it,
and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort is
rewarded by the rest of society. There success is not just of their own making.
It is a product of the world in which they grow up. Accidents of time and place
and birth matter too much.
 Chapter three: The trouble with Geniuses, part 1
“ Knowledge of a boy’s IQ is of little help if you are faced with a
formful of clever boys”

• Geniuses are the ultimate outliers. However, we’ve seen that extraordinary
achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.

• The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once

someone has reach an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ
points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage.

• Raven’s progressive matrices is measuring analytical intelligence.

“Divergence test” are looking for creativity.

• Intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

 Chapter four: The trouble with Geniuses, part 2
“ After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be
put on probation.”

• Practical intelligence: “Knowing what to say to whom, knowing when

to say it, and knowing how to sat it for maximum effect”. It is procedural: it is
about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you
know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical in nature: that is, it’s not
knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations
correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence
separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. General
intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one
doesn’t imply the presence of the other.

• IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savvy is

knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned.
 Chapter four: The trouble with Geniuses, part 2
“ After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation.”

• High-class children learn to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages.

They make special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to
accommodate their desires. They learn the sense of entitlement. They
successfully know how to shift the balance of power away from the adults and
toward themselves. These are key characteristics of the strategy of concerted
cultivation.

• By contrast, the working-class and poor children are characterized by “ an

emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint”. They don’t know how to
get their way, or hoe to “customize” whatever the environment they are in, for
their best purposes. They should be quite and submissive, with eyes turned
away.

• No one can make his way alone, and no one – nor rock stars,
not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not
even geniuses – ever makes it alone.
 Chapter five: The three lessons of Joe Flom
“ Mary got a quarter”

• Successful people don’t do it alone. They’re products of particular places and

environment. Outliers always have help along the way.

• Even the most gifted of people, equipped with the best of family lessons,
cannot escape the limitations of their generation. You should arrive at the
perfect time, with the perfect skills. You have to exploit the opportunity, you
have to have some virtues and work hard. You should sacrifice, scrimp and
save and invest wisely.

• Autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward are the
three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. If it is not how
much money we make that ultimately makes us happy. It’s whether our work
fulfills us. If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and
imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. Your world-your culture
and generation and family history- give you the greatest of opportunities.
Part TWO:

LEGACY
 Chapter six: Harlan, Kentucky
“ Die like a man, like your brother did!”

• Culture of honor: When a person is under constant threat of ruin through the
loss of his possessions. 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 challenge to his reputation – and that’s what a
“culture of honor” means. It’s a world where a man’s reputation is at the center
of his livelihood and self-worth. The “culture of honor” hypothesis that it
matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where
your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents grew up
and great-great-grandparents grew up. That is strange and powerful fact. It’s
just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies
turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that. These kinds of
attitudes passed down from generation to generation through social heritance.
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They persist, generation after generation.
 Chapter six: Harlan, Kentucky
“ Die like a man, like your brother did!”

• Conclusion:
• Success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages:

 When and where you are born.

 What your parents did for a living.
 What the circumstances of your upbringing were all make a significant
difference in how well you do in the world.

 Traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears play the same role.
 Chapter seven: The ethnic theory of plane crashes
“ Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot”

• The combination of errors leads to disaster.

• Hofstede’s dimensions are among the most widely used paradigms in cross-
cultural psychology:
 “Individualism-collectivism scale”.
 “Uncertainty avoidance”.
 “Power distance index”.
 “Transmission orientation”.
 Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that
are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history
of the community we grow up in, and those differences are extraordinarily
specific.

• Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where

we’re from.
 Chapter seven: The ethnic theory of plane crashes
“ Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot”

• Cultural legacies matter – that they are powerful and pervasive and that they
persist, long after their original usefulness has passed.

• Culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to
professional success. Each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive
mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to
acknowledge. Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.
 Chapter eight: Rice paddies and math tests
“ No one can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to
make his family rich”

• As human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two
seconds. We must easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that
two-second span. Cultural legacies matter, and once we’ve seen the surprising
effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a
quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it’s hard not to wonder how many
other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first-century intellectual
tasks.

• Working really hard is what successful people do, an the genius of the culture
formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to
find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty.

• Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to

work hard to make sense of something that most people give up after few
moments.
 Chapter Nine: Marita ’s Bargain
“ All my friends are now from KIPP”

• Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is
the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in
school. These are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting
styles and concerted cultivation.

• To become a success at what we do, we have to shed some part of our

own identity.
 Chapter Nine: Marita ’s Bargain
“ All my friends are now from KIPP”

• Success follows a predictable course. It’s not the

brightest who succeed. Nor is success simply the sum of
the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It
is rather a gift. Outliers are those who:
 Have been given opportunities.
 who have had the strength and presence of mind to
seize them.
 They are born at the right time with the right parents
and the right ethnicity.
 Were given the opportunity to escape the constraints
of their cultural legacy.
 Epilogue: A Jamaican story
“ If a progeny of youth colored children is brought forth, these are
emancipated”

• Outliers may appear at first blush to lie outside

ordinary experience. But they don’t. they are products of
history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their
success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded
in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved,
some not, some earned, some just plain lucky-but all
critical to making them who you are. The outlier, in the
end, is not an outlier at all.