Release year: 2008

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

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Review

Oops, this book was a mild disappointment!

While its main idea has value (“success is the result of luck and wealth of seized opportunities”), it did not seem to me like it was teaching much of value. At best, the reader would understand that incredibly successful people are still human and benefited from help along the way. That may inspire a few to build a world where future generations will have more opportunities. Isn’t that what most parents already instinctively strive for, though? At worst, the reader would have a comfortable explanation whenever they view their lives unsatisfactorily: surely, the reason they fell behind their peers is due to their rotten luck and how they were let down by their social heritage.

What I fear is that readers of this book will leave with the wrong idea, namely that their (lack of) success should be blamed on external factors (luck). How can I motivate myself to get off my butt and fix my problems when I’m told the world’s smartest man could not find academic success and now works on a ranch, while Bill Gates became a computer wiz because he was born on October 28 1955, the “perfect birth date”? These thoughts do not make me feel empowered at all.

There are still some golden nuggets in the book worth unearthing. I particularly enjoyed Gladwell’s take on cultures of honor, which gave me some insight into how culture from the Southern United States came to be:

Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas where you can’t farm and probably raise goats and sheep. You’re under constant threat of ruin through the less of your animals. You have to be aggressive and make it clear, through words and deeds, that you are not weak, that you are willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to his reputation.

p. 166

I also appreciated Gladwell’s take on mitigated speech (see Star Qutoes below, p. 194-197), which reminded me of the much more eloquent Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson and its concept of psychological safety. The statistic that planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying is a pretty interesting one.

All in all, this book did not discourage me to dive deeper in Gladwell’s celebrated bibliography. However, as much as I was hoping to enjoy Outliers, its patchwork storytelling approach and shallow take on the patterns behind success simply did not jive with me. It felt like a lesser version of Originals , which was already on the brink of getting a thumbs down from me. If you’re looking for a book that will show you the road to success, I think you can do better:

Félix rating:
👎

Mind map

⭐ Star Quotes

Part I: Opportunity

Chapter 1: The Matthew Effect

  1. (p. 19) Personal explanations of #success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. It makes a difference where and when we grew up.
  2. (p. 30) It is those who are successful who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.
  3. (p. 30) #Success is the result of accumulative advantage.

Chapter 2: The 10,000-Hour Rule

  1. (p. 38) Achievement = little talent + LOTS of preparation
  2. (p. 42) #Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.

Chapter 3: The Trouble With Geniuses, Part 1

  1. (p. 90) #Intellect and #achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

Chapter 4: The Trouble With Geniuses, Part 2

  1. (p. 115) ⭐ No one ever makes it alone.

Chapter 5: The Three Lessons of Joe Flom

  1. (p. 119) Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.
  2. (p. 137) The sense of #possibility so necessary for #success comes from the particular #opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with.
  3. (p. 138) ⭐ Even the most #gifted people, equipped with the best of family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.
  4. (p. 149) The three qualities that #work has to have to be satisfying:
    • autonomy
    • complexity
    • a connection between effort and reward
  5. (p. 150) ⭐ Hard #work is a prison sentence only if it does not have a #meaning.

Part II: Legacy

Chapter 6: Harlan, Kentucky

  1. (p. 170) ⭐ A #culture of honor is a world where someone’s reputation is at the center of their livelihood and self-worth. Only in a culture of honor would it have occurred that shooting someone was an appropriate response to a personal insult.
  2. (p. 175) Social heritance explains how accents persist over time. Whatever mechanism passes on speech patterns probably passes on behavioral and emotional patterns as well.

Chapter 7: The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes

  1. (p. 184) The kinds of #errors that cause plane crashes are invariable errors of teamwork and communication:
    • One pilot knows something important and doesn’t tell the other pilot
    • One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error
  2. (p. 188) When you’re tired, your decision-making skills erode. You start missing things that you would pick up on any other day.
  3. (p. 194-194) Mitigated speech is any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we’re being polite, or when we’re ashamed or embarrassed, or when we’re being deferential to authority. There are right and wrong moments to use mitigated speech.
  4. (p. 195) Levels of mitigated speech (higher number = more mitigated):
    1. Command: “Turn here.”
    2. Obligation statement: “I think we need to turn here.”
    3. Suggestion: “Let’s go around and turn here.”
    4. Query: “Which direction would you like to turn?”
    5. Preference: “I think it would be wise to turn here.”
    6. Hint: “That curve ahead looks mean.”
      1. A hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse.
  5. (p. 197) ⭐ Mitigated speech gets reduced when people call each other by their first names.
  6. (p. 197) ⭐ Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t afraid to speak up.
  7. (p. 206) Overcoming mitigated speech is about reducing the power distance index between colleagues.
  8. (p. 206) The task of convincing someone to #assert themself depends an awful lot on their culture’s power distance rating.
  9. (p. 207) Mitigated speech can make it seem like we don’t have a problem to solve.
  10. (p. 219) Cultural legacies matter. They are powerful and pervasive and persist long after their original usefulness has passed. But legacies are not an indelible part of who we are. If we are willing to confront aspects of our heritage, we can change.

Chapter 8: Rice Paddies and Math Tests

  1. (p. 238) No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family #rich.
  2. (p. 246) ⭐ #Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Chapter 9: Marita’s Bargain

  1. (p. 258) 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.
  2. (p. 267) Outliers are those who have been given #opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
  3. (p. 268) The build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success with a society that provides #opportunities for all.