Outliers: Reviews, reactions, and excerpts

It is not the brightest who succeed ... 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.

- p. 267The ideas and theories contained inside Malcolm Gladwell's Outsiders represent thinking outside the box at its finest. Or thinking outside the box on steroids. Gladwell invites you to look at the world in a different way, and I RSVP'ed a wholehearted "yes." His perspective is exciting and fresh and, most important to me, steeped in data and research. There is evidence behind his reasoning for hockey player birthing windows and Korean airline terror and Jewish lawyering. In short, Gladwell argues that to know where you're going, you should look where you came from. I am who I am in part because of my upbringing and circumstance and environment and in part because of the decisions I made and the work I put in.My son will be the same.So if I'm holding out for that vicarious Pulitzer Prize, I better move him to the East Coast asap.

The hidden keys to success (p. 19)

"In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. Peope 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. ... It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."

Holding kids back in school (p. 28)

"Parents with a child born at the end of the calendar year often think about holding their child back before the start of kindergarten: it's hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child born many months earlier, but most parents, one suspects, think that whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually goes away. But it doesn't. It's just like hockey. 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."

10,000 hours (p. 40)

"Researchers have settles on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours."'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."

The test of objects and the reality of higher IQs (p. 86)

"Write down as many different uses that you an think of for the following object:

• A brick
• A blanket

... "Here, for example are answers to the "uses of objects" test collected by Liam Hudson from a student named Poole at a top British high school:"(Brick). To use in smash-and-grab raids. To help hold a house together. To use in a game of Russian roulette if you want to keep fit at the same time (bricks at ten paces, turn and throw - no evasive action allowed). To hold the (duvet) down on a bed, tie a brick at each corner. As a breaker of empty Coca-Cola bottles."(Blanket). To use on a bed. As a cover for illicit sex in the woods. As a tent. To make smoke signals with. As a sail for a boat, cart, or sled. As a substitute for a towel. As a target for shooting practice for short-sighted people. As a thing to catch people jumping out of burning skyscrapers."It's not hard to read Poole's answers and get some sense of how his mind works. He's funny. He's a little subversive and libidinous. He has the flair for the dramatic. His mind leaps from violent imagery to sex to people jumping out of burning skyscrapers to very practical issues, such as how to get a duvet to stay on a bed. He gives us the impression that if we gave him another ten minutes, he'd come up with another twenty uses."Now, for the sake of comparison, consider the answers of another student from Hudson's sample. His name is Florence. Hudson tells us that Florence is a prodigy, with one of the highest IQs in his school."(Brick). Building things, throwing."(Blanket). Keepig warm, smothering fire, tying to trees and sleeping in (as a hammock), improvised stretcher."Where is Florence's imagination? He identified the most common and most functional uses for bricks and blankets and simply stopped. Florence's IQ is higher than Poole's. But that means little, since both students are above the threshold. What is more interesting is that Poole's mind can leap from violent imagery to sex to people jumping out of buildings without missing a beat, and Florence's mind can't. Now which of these two students do you think is better suited to do the kind of brilliant, imaginative work that wins Nobel Prizes?"

Parenting styles and "concerted cultivation" (p. 104)

"Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation." It's an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own."... in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages."

The keys to satisfying work (p. 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. His work was complex: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets."Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between efort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying."

Lessons (p. 151)

"The most important consequence of the miracle of the garment industry, though, was what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced. Imagine what it must have been like to watch the meteoric rise of Regina and Louis Borgenicht through the eyes of one of their offspring. They learned the same lesson that little Alex Williams would learn nearly a century later - a lesson crucial to those who wanted to tackle the upper reaches of a profession like law or medicine: if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagnation, you can shape the world to your desires."