Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
The Roseto Mystery
“These people were dying of old age. That’ s it”
“In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours”
The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1
“Knowledge of a boy’s IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of cleverboys
The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2
“After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation”
The Three Lessons of Joe Flom
“Mary got a quarter”
1. There was a group of real successes and there was a group of real failures, and that the successes were far more likely to have come from wealthier families.
2. 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 particular place in history presents us with
Lesson Number Three: The Garment Industry and Meaningful Work
HARLAN, KENTUCKY
The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes
“Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot”
Here are the top five pilot PDIs by country. If you compare this list to the ranking of plane crashes by country, they match up very closely.
1. Brazil
2. South Korea
3. Morocco
4. Mexico
5. Philippines
The five lowest pilot PDIs by country are:
15. United States
16. Ireland
17. South Africa
18. Australia
19. New Zealand
Rice Paddies and Math Tests
“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich”
The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system.
We assume that being good at things like calculus and algebra is a simple function of how smart someone is. But the differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different—that being good at math may also be rooted in a group's culture.
What if coming from a culture shaped by the demands of growing rice also makes you better at math?
Western agriculture is "mechanically"oriented. In the West, if a farmer wanted to become more efficient or increase his yield, he introduced more and more sophisticated equipment, which allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor.
But in Japan or China, farmers didn't have the money to buy equipment—and, in any case, there certainly wasn't any extra land that could easily be converted into new field. So rice farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter, by being better managers of their own time, and by making better choices. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer.
French peasant: Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. If you were a peasant farmer in Southern China, by contrast, you didn't sleep through the winter. In the short break marked by the dry season, from November through February, you busied yourself with side tasks. Working in a rice field is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field.
First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields. Second, it's complex work. The rice farmer isn't simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop.
Go to any Western college campus and you'll find that Asian students have a reputation for being in the library long after everyone else has left. Sometimes people of Asian background get offended when their culture is described this way, because they think that the stereotype is being used as a form of disparagement. But a belief in work ought to be a thing of beauty.
Working really hard is what successful people do, and 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. That lesson has served Asians well in many endeavors but rarely so perfectly as in the case of mathematics
Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.
All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn't even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work
So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn't surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like "No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."
Marita's Bargain
“All my friend now are from KIPP”
How could that be a bad bargain? Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is 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—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it's a better shot at making the all-star team. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg. For Bill Gates, the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high.
They were born at the right time with the right parents and the right ethnicity, which allowed them to practice takeover law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught on. And what Korean Air did, when it finally turned its operations around, was give its pilots the opportunity to escape the constraints of their cultural legacy.
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunities for all.
Malcolm Gladwell
The Roseto Mystery
“These people were dying of old age. That’ s it”
- Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system
- The idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are
- “For unto everyone that hat shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but form him that hat not shall be taken away even that which he hath” — M A T T H E W 25:29
- "Embrace the Struggle."
- What is the question we always ask about the successful?
We want to know what they're like—what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top. - People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage.
- Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulative advantage."
- Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement.
We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. 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. And why? Because 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. - Those were the ingredients of success at the highest level: passion, talent, and hard work. But there was another element.
“In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours”
- The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes.
- "The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin.
- 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.
- But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert.
- But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.
The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1
“Knowledge of a boy’s IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of cleverboys
- Geniuses are the ultimate outliers. Surely there is nothing that can hold someone like that back. But is that true?
- In general, the higher your score, the more education you'll get, the more money you're likely to make, and—believe it or not—the longer you'll live.
- But there's a catch. The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Intelligence has a threshold.
- How much money did they make? How far up in the profession did they go? How satisfied were they with their careers? What kind of social and community contributions did they make? What kind of honors had they won? They looked at everything that could conceivably be an indication of real-world success.
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 say 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. Its 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. You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence.
The Three Lessons of Joe Flom
“Mary got a quarter”
- Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments
- "It's not that those guys were smarter lawyers than anyone else," "It's that they had a skill that they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable.
1. There was a group of real successes and there was a group of real failures, and that the successes were far more likely to have come from wealthier families.
2. 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 particular place in history presents us with
Lesson Number Three: The Garment Industry and Meaningful Work
- 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. It is not how much money we make.
- Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.
- If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.
- Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities. Their world—their culture and generation and family history—gave them the greatest of opportunities.
HARLAN, KENTUCKY
- Culture of honor: It's a world where a man's reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth.
- Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas,
If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops.
- 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.
- 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 make a significant difference in how well you do in the world
The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes
“Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot”
- 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. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps—and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them
- Communicate not just in the sense of issuing commands but also in the sense of encouraging and cajoling and calming and negotiating and sharing information in the clearest and most transparent manner possible.
- "Mitigated speech," which refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we're being deferential to authority.
- "Uncertainty avoidance." How well does a culture tolerate ambiguity?
Here are the top five "uncertainty avoidance" countries, according to Hofstede's database—that is, the countries most reliant on rules and plans and most likely to stick to procedure regardless of circumstances - 1. Greece
2. Portugal
3. Guatemala
4. Uruguay
5. Belgium
The bottom five—that is, the cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity—are:
49. Hong Kong
50. Sweden
51. Denmark
52. Jamaica
- 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 grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.
Here are the top five pilot PDIs by country. If you compare this list to the ranking of plane crashes by country, they match up very closely.
1. Brazil
2. South Korea
3. Morocco
4. Mexico
5. Philippines
The five lowest pilot PDIs by country are:
15. United States
16. Ireland
17. South Africa
18. Australia
19. New Zealand
- Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where we're from
- We have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful.
- Why are we so squeamish? Why is the fact that 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—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash
Rice Paddies and Math Tests
“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich”
The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system.
We assume that being good at things like calculus and algebra is a simple function of how smart someone is. But the differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different—that being good at math may also be rooted in a group's culture.
What if coming from a culture shaped by the demands of growing rice also makes you better at math?
Western agriculture is "mechanically"oriented. In the West, if a farmer wanted to become more efficient or increase his yield, he introduced more and more sophisticated equipment, which allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor.
But in Japan or China, farmers didn't have the money to buy equipment—and, in any case, there certainly wasn't any extra land that could easily be converted into new field. So rice farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter, by being better managers of their own time, and by making better choices. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer.
French peasant: Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. If you were a peasant farmer in Southern China, by contrast, you didn't sleep through the winter. In the short break marked by the dry season, from November through February, you busied yourself with side tasks. Working in a rice field is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field.
First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields. Second, it's complex work. The rice farmer isn't simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop.
Go to any Western college campus and you'll find that Asian students have a reputation for being in the library long after everyone else has left. Sometimes people of Asian background get offended when their culture is described this way, because they think that the stereotype is being used as a form of disparagement. But a belief in work ought to be a thing of beauty.
Working really hard is what successful people do, and 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. That lesson has served Asians well in many endeavors but rarely so perfectly as in the case of mathematics
Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.
All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn't even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work
So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn't surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like "No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."
Marita's Bargain
“All my friend now are from KIPP”
How could that be a bad bargain? Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is 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—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it's a better shot at making the all-star team. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg. For Bill Gates, the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high.
They were born at the right time with the right parents and the right ethnicity, which allowed them to practice takeover law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught on. And what Korean Air did, when it finally turned its operations around, was give its pilots the opportunity to escape the constraints of their cultural legacy.
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunities for all.