Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Somewhat interesting book. Certain parts were really good. Others terribly boring.

What follows are the notes I highlighted whilst reading the book.

The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.

…the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

…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.

…Mozart… actually “developed late,” since he didn’t produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than twenty years.

Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.

The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program… or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.

Intelligence has a threshold.

If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things – things that have nothing to do with intelligence – must start to matter more.

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates.

In the end, only one thing mattered: family background.

“I always feel that the closer you get to the original sources, the better off you are.”

…what your parents do for a living, and the assumptions that accompany the class your parents belong to, matter.

“When I built the cable company, in the early stages, I was making deals where I would have been bankrupt if I hadn’t pulled it off. I had confidence that I could make it work.”

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 behaviour that we cannot make sense of our world without them.

So far in Outliers we’ve seen that 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.

That’s what happens when you’re tired. Your decision-making skills erode. You start missing things – things that you would pick up on any other day.

…a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker.

But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

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.

Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

Well, as you can see from the quotes: this is more of a book about success than about business per se. Each chapter tells a story and draws its conclusion.

There were some fascinating points, those in bold above for example, but on the whole I’m not rushing to buy another of Gladwell’s books.

Hope you found the above valuable.

Regards,

Sam