Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. 

4/5 rating. 

Book #123 of 2019. Read October 20, 2019.

What an interesting read!

This book deals with “outliers”: someone or something that is “markedly different in value from the others of the sample”. Our society so often treats these incredible people as “self-made,” and trumpets their resolve, or work ethic, or some other individualistic attribute for why they are successful. Gladwell instead, uses research and data to support his belief that we are more products of our circumstances as a whole: from our up-bringing and socioeconomic status, to less obvious causes, such as our birth dates, and places of birth. Meaning that you can’t distance a successful person from the many things that have shaped them; and it certainly doesn’t depend on their individual merit near as much as everything else.

This book popularized the “10,000-hour rule” stating that this is the amount of time of dedicated practice it takes in order to be world-class at something. Along with this, I really loved his discussions about how different cultures can impact people, and not only in the normal ways you might think.

If you want to become an “outlier” and someone who makes their impact on the world (and let’s be honest, you know you want that!), you should definitely read this book to see the ways you are being affected by your up-bringing, and hopefully you can learn how to use those advantages to catapult yourself to a place of importance and impact!

Quotes:

“‘I think overall it’s a disadvantage,’ Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator. When he ran for governor of Florida, he repeatedly referred to himself as a ‘self-made man,’ and it is a measure of how deeply we associate success with the efforts of the individual that few batted an eye at that description.”

“People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. 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. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

“They found that among fourth graders, the oldest children scored somewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children. That, as Dhuey explains, is a ‘huge effect.’ It means that if you take two intellectually equivalent fourth graders with birthdays at opposite ends of the cutoff date, the older student could score in the eightieth percentile, while the younger one could score in the sixty-eighth percentile. That’s the difference between qualifying for a gifted program and not.”

“At four-year colleges in the United States – the highest stream of postsecondary education – students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6 percent. That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists.”

“‘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. ‘In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.’”

“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

“What Lempert is saying is that by the only measure that a law school really ought to care about – how well its graduates do in the real world – minority students aren’t less qualified. They’re just as successful as white students. And why? Because even though the academic credentials of minority students at [the University of] Michigan aren’t as good as those of white students, the quality of students at the law school is high enough that they’re still above the threshold.”

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”

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

“The typical rice paddy is about as big as a hotel room. A typical Asian rice farm might be composed of two or three paddies. A village in China of fifteen hundred people might support itself entirely with 450 acres of land, which in the American Midwest would be the size of a typical family farm. At that scale, with families of five and six people living off a farm the size of two hotel rooms, agriculture changes dramatically.”

“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. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. 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.”

“Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? (They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.”

“Now take a look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. 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.”

“It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. 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.”

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