What Are The Outliers

Cultural legacies play an important role in determining the success of outliers.

These legacies shape how we react to our environments, how hard we work, how we approach opportunities, and our deference to power and authority.

The 10,000 Hour Rule: it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert at anything.

But while this is true, the convergence of luck and opportunity is needed

For example:i Bll Gates had unlimited exposure to computers at an early age or most of the Silicon Valley...

The difference in performance between low-income students and high-income students is not down to differences in intelligence. Given the same opportunities, students from the two groups perform at the same level.

Low-income students’ performance drops during the summer vacation. Their readi...

For some outliers, disadvantages are often blessings in disguise. Rags-to riches stories focus on the many odds that the hero had to overcome, but they fail to point out that the odds work to empower the hero over future adversities.

Outliers also benefit from “Demographic luck” or being bo...

The length of the summer vacation also has implications on how well students perform. Students from the Asian countries of Japan and China have longer school days and as a result have better reading and math skills.

The Matthew Effect: advantages tend to accumulate over time. Those that are given an early push get more advantages as time goes by and those that are put at a disadvantage continue to get limited resources. The Matthew Effect is basically another way of stating the law of cumulative advantage.

Having high intelligence (IQ) does not automatically mean that you will be successful in life.

Above a certain IQ range, there isn’t much difference in performance.

There is a threshold for achieving in a particular area. Once that threshold is achieved, the influence of grades and I...

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is a book that explores the hidden forces behind successful people. Gladwell shows that as much as talent and hard work are responsible for many of the success stories that we see and hear, there is much more to success than meets the eye. A bit repetitive so you can ...