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OutliersThe Story of SuccessMalcolm GladwellNew York: Little Brown and Company, 2008“This is a book about outliers,about men and women who dothings that are out of theordinary.” [p. 17]Includes:2Quotes from Outliers5Detailed outline7Observations and DiscussionWhat makes successful people so different? In this booksynopsis with Randy Mayeux, you will find that the secretof success may have more to do with opportunity, the“10,000 hour rule,” luck, and what Gladwell calls“accumulative advantage,” rather than individual merit.During this presentation, you will discover that maybeoutliers aren’t really outliers after all.Outliers is a bestseller and voted as one of the Best Booksof 2008.

Quotes1. In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success whatStewart Wolf did for our understanding of health. (p. 11).2. Canadian hockey is a meritocracy. Thousands of Canadian boysbegin to play the sport at the “novice” level, before they are evenin kindergarten. From that point on, there are leagues for everyage class, and at each of those levels, the players are sifted andsorted and evaluated, with the most talented separated out andgroomed for the next level. By the time players reach theirmidteens, the very best of the best have been channeled into anelite league This is the way most sports pick their future stars Forthat matter, it is not all that different from the way the world ofclassical music picks its future virtuosos, or the way the world ofballet picks its future ballerinas, or the way our elite educationalsystem picks its future scientists and intellectuals. (pp. 16 & 17).“People don’t rise fromnothing.” [p. 18]3. You can’t buy your way into Major Junior A hockey Success inhockey is based on individual merit – and both of those words areimportant. Players are judged on their own performance, not onanyone else’s, and on the basis of their ability, not on some otherarbitrary fact.4. Or are they? (p. 17).5. This is a book about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary. Overthe course of this book, I’m going to introduce you to one kind of outlier after another: to geniuses,business tycoons, rock stars, and software programmers In examining the lives of the remarkableamong us – the skilled, the talented, and the driven – I will argue that there is something profoundlywrong with the way we make sense of success. (p. 17).6. When Jeb Bush 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 fewbatted an eye at that description.7. In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work.People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. (Successfulpeople) in fact are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunitiesand cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in waysthat others cannot. (pp. 18 & 19).8. Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest notjust because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked itssunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and nolumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come for hardy seeds.But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down theroots and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid? This is not a book about talltrees. It’s a book about forests – and hockey is a good place to start because the explanation for whogets to the top of the hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated than it looks. In fact, it’sdownright peculiar. (pp. 19-20).Outliers2

“Success is the result of whatsociologists like to call‘accumulative advantage.’”[ p.30]9. Most parents, one suspects, think that whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarteneventually goes away. But it doesn’t. The small initial advantage that the child born in the early partof the year has over the child born at the end of the years persists. It locks children into patterns ofachievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and onfor years. (p. 28).10. Think for a moment about what the story of hockey and early birthdays says about success. It tells usthat our notion that it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much too simplistic.11. It’s the “Matthew Effect.” (from the sociologist Robert Merton). It’s those who are successful who aremost likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich whoget the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and the most attention.And it’s the biggest nine-and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is theresult of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” (p. 30).12. Those born in the last half of the year have all been discouraged, or overlooked, or pushed out of thesport. The talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic population has been squandered. (p. 31).13. Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung We prematurely wrote off people as failures. (p. 32).14. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? Achievement is talent plus preparation.The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smallerthe role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play. (p. 38).15. The people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. Theywork much, much harder. (p. 39).16. Lucky breaks don’t seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and starathletes. They seem like the rule. (p. 56).17. “The best time during the history of the United States for the poor boy ambitious for high businesssuccess to have been born was around the year 1835.” (C. Wright Mills). (p. 63).18. Steve Jobs came of age breathing the air of the very business he would later dominate. (p. 66).19. There are very clearly patterns here, and we don’t want to acknowledge them. We pretend thatsuccess is exclusively a matter of individual merit. (p. 67).20. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’tseem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage A mature scientist with an adult IQ of130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as is one whose IQ is 180. (pp. 79 & 80).21. “Knowledge of a boy’s IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.” (BarrySchwarz). (p. 84).Outliers3

22. The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor tomove you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls“practical intelligence knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing howto say it for maximum effect.” (p. 101).23. The sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in themodern world. (p. 108).24. Chris Langan (IQ of 195 – but without the “practical skills” of others) had had to make his way alone –and no one – not rock stars, not professional athletes, nor software billionaires, and not even geniuses –ever makes it alone. (p. 115).25. We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battlingoverwhelming odds. But (p. 120).26. “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.” (p.224).27. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea Asian childrenlearn to count much faster than American children. (p. 229).28. Countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answeringevery single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the bestjob of solving math problems. (pp. 247-248).29. The early educational reformers (in the United States) were tremendously concerned that children notget too much schooling Horace Mann believed that working students too hard would create a“most pernicious influence upon character and habits .Not infrequently is health itself destroyed byover-stimulating the mind.” (p. 253).30. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The only problemwith school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it For its poorest students,America doesn’t have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem (pp. 258 & 259 & 260).31. Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outsideordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity andlegacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages andinheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky – but all critical to makingthem who they are.32. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all. (p. 285).“There are very clear patterns here.And we don’t want to acknowledge them.We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit.”(p. 67).Outliers4

OutliersThe Story of SuccessNew York: Little Brown and Company [2008]by Malcolm GladwellSome of the Key Content and Ideas from the BookOutlier, noun1. Something that is situated away from or classed differently from a mainor related body2. A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from theothers of the sampleThe stories:The Roseto Mystery– it really does take a village to help people live longer lives Part 1: Opportunity Stories of “individual” success(there is no “individual” success!) The Matthew Effect (Matthew 25:29) – The story of successful athletesstarts very, very young, and depends on (the) accumulativeadvantages. And it revolves around birth month. In any elite group of hockey players:40% born January – March, 30% born April – June, 20% born July– September, 10% born October – December Note the obvious: a nine or ten year old (when coaches startchoosing the elite players for the traveling squads, and theextended practices and additional games), born in January isbigger, faster, and more coordinated by a noticeable anadvantageous gap over a nine or ten year old born 10-12months later The three advantages: selection, streaming, and differentiatedexperience The Beatles performed live 1200 times in just a few years -- 1200 times! How did the computer geniuses, Bill Gates (Microsoft) andBill Joy (Sun Microsystems) become the true computer successstories?(You can also throw Steve Jobs into this story.) Why Robert Oppenheimer changed the world, and how ChristopherLangan never quite hit it big. Who succeeds as (what kind of) a lawyer?- The story of Joe From “Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professional inspite of their humble origins. They became professionalsbecause of their humble origins.” (p. 153).Intrinsic talent maybe necessary,but it is notsufficient.Success is acombination offactors, includingculture,opportunity,“practical skills,”and plenty ofhard, hard workthat includesmuch intentionalpractice!