Book Byte #199 "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

The Story of Success

📣 Curious Quotes from the Author

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

“Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Achievement is talent plus preparation”

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

“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. Being a teacher is meaningful.”

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

“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. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation”

“Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs 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 they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.”

📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea

No lady, man, or hockey player from Canada is an island. A frequently improbable chain of events, fortunate breaks, and opportunities that come together to create the ideal environment for extraordinary accomplishment is what leads to extraordinary achievement.

🤝Collaborative Insight for Techies

We usually judge work more harshly if we are bored of it. But work is mostly boring. Back when work was mostly physical labor, you at least were strengthening your muscles, so there was a sense of satisfaction. Now, when you’re hired for your knowledge and stop growing that knowledge because all they want you to do is repeat a simple task forever for a set amount of salary, it turns into a borefest, you stop growing, and everything feels bad.

You need to work on all the areas of your life, even if you are experiencing stale growth at work. It’s the counteraction to fixing that bad feeling.

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