Outliers: The Story of Success
⛰ What It’s About
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.
🔍 How I Discovered It
I already have this book in my Kindle, and have read couple pages. But, I realize everyone speak about this book a lot, then I have a tought to borrow the original one from Libby.
🧠 Thoughts
When i think about Malcolm Gladwell the first come into my mind will be this book, he’s arguing smart people don’t automatically become successful, they do so because they got lucky. This rule applies to everyone including the likes of Bill Gates and Robert Oppenheimer. That’s it. That’s what the whole book is about. Gladwell looks at case after case of this: Canadian hockey players, Korean airline pilots, poor kids in the Bronx, Jewish lawyers, etc… Even with all this evidence it feels like he’s pulling in examples that fit his theory
🥰 Who Would Like It?
I originally thought this to be a self-improvement kind of book, but quickly figured that’s not the case, then may be some sort of a business development one, which also fell apart quickly. I cannot round off this any closer than to some kind of a sociology - psychology combo. So if anyone into skepticism this would be a good read
Most valueable quote
Your Kindle Notes For:
Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
Last accessed on Sunday September 19, 2021
| 44 Highlight(s) | 0 Note(s) |
Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
| Yellow highlight | Page: 10 |
| Note | Page: 10 |
They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 16 |
| Note | Page: 16 |
Canadian hockey is a meritocracy.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 17 |
| Note | Page: 17 |
We’re going to uncover the secrets of a remarkable lawyer, look at what separates the very best pilots from pilots who have crashed planes, and try to figure out why Asians are so good at math.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 18 |
| Note | Page: 18 |
our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 19 |
| Note | Page: 19 |
Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 25 |
| Note | Page: 25 |
If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented”; and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date. In
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 30 |
| Note | Page: 30 |
Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 33 |
| Note | Page: 33 |
Schools could do the same thing. Elementary and middle schools could put the January through April–born students in one class, the May through August in another class, and those born in September through December in the third class.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 38 |
| Note | Page: 38 |
ones. 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.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 39 |
| Note | Page: 39 |
Their research suggests that 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.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 42 |
| Note | Page: 42 |
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 42 |
| Note | Page: 42 |
“It wasn’t particularly hard,” he says matter-of-factly. “There was plenty of time to check it twice.”
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 43 |
| Note | Page: 43 |
And if you made even a single error—even a typographical error—in your program, you had to take the cards back, track down the error, and begin the whole process again.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 44 |
| Note | Page: 44 |
one computer scientist from that era remembers, “did not teach you programming. It taught you patience and proofreading.”
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 45 |
| Note | Page: 45 |
“Do you know what the difference is between the computing cards and time-sharing?” Joy says. “It’s the difference between playing chess by mail and speed chess.” Programming wasn’t an exercise in frustration anymore. It was fun.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 55 |
| Note | Page: 55 |
I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.”
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 55 |
| Note | Page: 55 |
But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 66 |
| Note | Page: 66 |
Jobs attended evening talks by Hewlett-Packard scientists. The talks were about the latest advances in electronics and Jobs, exercising a style that was a trademark of his personality, collared Hewlett-Packard engineers and drew additional information from them.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 69 |
| Note | Page: 69 |
“KNOWLEDGE OF A BOY’S IQ IS OF LITTLE HELP IF YOU ARE FACED WITH A FORMFUL OF CLEVER BOYS.”
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 76 |
| Note | Page: 76 |
we’ve seen that extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 86 |
| Note | Page: 86 |
Because even though the academic credentials of minority students at 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. They are smart enough.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 90 |
| Note | Page: 90 |
If we want to understand the likelihood of his becoming a true outlier, we have to know a lot more about him than that.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 96 |
| Note | Page: 96 |
“Ideas are in the air constantly. It’s such a stimulating place to be.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 101 |
| Note | Page: 101 |
practical intelligence includes things like “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.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 101 |
| Note | Page: 101 |
It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 103 |
| Note | Page: 103 |
They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority. If their children were doing poorly at school, the wealthier parents challenged their teachers.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 113 |
| Note | Page: 113 |
“I always feel that the closer you get to the original sources, the better off you are,”
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 121 |
| Note | Page: 121 |
Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 128 |
| Note | Page: 128 |
“It’s not that those guys were smarter lawyers than anyone else,” Rifkind says. “It’s that they had a skill that they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable.”*
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 129 |
| Note | Page: 129 |
Lesson Number Two: Demographic Luck
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 139 |
| Note | Page: 139 |
Lesson Number Three: The Garment Industry and Meaningful Work
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 142 |
| Note | Page: 142 |
Jewish immigrants like the Floms and the Borgenichts and the Janklows were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 145 |
| Note | Page: 145 |
“There is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants arrived at the perfect time, with the perfect skills,”
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 149 |
| Note | Page: 149 |
When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and direction.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 149 |
| Note | Page: 149 |
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.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 149 |
| Note | Page: 149 |
It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 150 |
| Note | Page: 150 |
“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.
Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful. Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur, and the miracle of the garment industry—as
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 150 |
| Note | Page: 150 |
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.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 151 |
| Note | Page: 151 |
if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 176 |
| Note | Page: 176 |
The question for the second part of Outliers is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears can play the same role. Can we learn something about why people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously?
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 185 |
| Note | Page: 185 |
“Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don’t do things right. And for a long time it’s been clear that if you have two people operating the airplane cooperatively, you will have a safer operation
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 187 |
| Note | Page: 187 |
“human factors” research, which is the analysis of how human beings interact with complex systems like nuclear power plants and airplanes.
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 209 |
| Note | Page: 209 |
Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where we’re from,
Note:
| Yellow highlight | Page: 228 |
| Note | Page: 228 |
Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is “si” and 7 “qi”). Their English equivalents—“four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second.
Note:
Would you like to take some notes?
You haven’t created any notes for this book yet. You can add or remove bookmarks, highlights, and notes at any location in a Kindle book.
Sorry, we’‘ve experienced a problem. Please try again.