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Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Cover

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

My Thoughts

This is the 2d Malcolm Gladwell book I've read, the first was Talking to Strangers, and his writing way is i of my favorites.

My Favorite Quotedue south

  • Practice isn't the matter you exercise once you are good, practise is the matter that makes you lot good.
  • People at the acme practise not but work much harder than everyone else, they piece of work much much harder.
  • What started out as adversity ended upward being an opportunity.
  • It is not how much money we brand that makes us happy, it is whether our piece of work fulfills us.
  • The kinds of errors that cause airplane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

Fundamental Questions

  • After intelligence, what are some of those other things that matter for success?
  • Can nosotros learn something well-nigh how people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously?

People and Places Mentioned

  • Dr. Stewart Wolf and the Roseto effect
  • Robert Merton and the Matthew Effect
  • Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems)
  • Bill Gates
  • Christopher Langan (IQ between 195-210)
  • Lewis Terman, American Psychologist
  • Joe Flom, American Lawyer and partner at one of the largest law firms in the U.s.a., based in New York City.
  • Morton Janklow, partner in Janklow & Nesbit Assembly, the largest literary agency in the world.
  • Louis Borgenicht
  • Suren Ratwatte, airline researcher and executive.

Introduction

The introduction talks nearly Dr. Stewart Wolf and the Roseto effect.

The values of the world we inhabit, and the people nosotros environs ourselves with, has a profound effect on who nosotros are

Part One: Opportunity

Chapter one: The Matthew Effect

Sociologist Robert Merton coined the term the Matthew Issue which based on the Bible verse Matthew 25:29 "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken abroad even that which he hath."

There is something profoundly wrong with the way we brand sense of success.

The people who stand before kings may expect like they did it all past themselves, merely they are the beneficiaries of hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities, and cultural legacies that let them to learn and work hard and brand sense of the world in a way others cannot.

It makes a deviation where and when we grew up.

Skewed age distributions happen wherever three things happen:

  1. Selection
  2. Streaming (separating the talented from the "untalented")
  3. Differentiated feel

Examples of the Matthew Effect: the rich get the biggest taxation breaks, the best students get the best teaching and the most attention, the biggest kids get the most coaching in practice.

Success is the upshot of accumulative advantage.

Chapter ii: The 10,000-Hour Rule

Outliers reach their status through a combination of power, opportunity, and arbitrary reward.

The closer that psychologists expect at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the rule innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation plays in success.

In one case you have plenty ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes i performer from another is how hard they works. People at the height do non just work much harder than anybody else, they piece of work much much harder.

Excellence at a complex task requires a critical minimum-level of practice surfaces oftentimes in studies of expertise. Researchers have settled on the magic number for true expertise, x,000 hours.

Practice isn't the thing you do once you are good, practice is the matter that makes you good.

Chapter 3: The Trouble With Geniuses, Part 1

Raven's Progressive Matrices is a test that measures abstruse reasoning skills. Your IQ is calculated past how many questions you go right.

How does a person's performance in an IQ test transfer to real life success?

The human relationship between success and IQ works just upward to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ around 120, having additional IQ points does non seem to translate into whatever measurable real-world advantage. Thus, IQ has a threshold effect.

If intelligence merely matters up to a point, then past that point other things (things that have nix to do with intelligence) must start to thing more. Like in basketball, one time you are alpine enough, then you kickoff to care about speed, court-sense, and shooting touch.

After intelligence, what are some of those other things that matter for success?

Write downwards as many different uses as you lot can think of for the following items: a brick, a blanket. This is known as a divergence examination. This requires you to use your imagination and take your mind in as many different directions as possible.

Intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

Chapter 4: The Trouble With Geniuses, Part 2

The particular skill that allows you lot to convince your teacher to move you from the morning to the afternoon department of course, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls practical intelligence.

Practical Intelligence includes knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say information technology, and knowing how to say it for maximum affect. It is most knowing how to exercise something without necessarily knowing why you lot know it, or being able to explain it. It is cognition that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.

Practical Intelligence is separate from analytical or full general intelligence as measured by IQ tests. General Intelligence and Applied Intelligence are orthogonal. The presence of one does not imply the presence of the other.

IQ is a measure, to some caste, of innate ability. Social savvy is knowledge, it is a gear up a skills that hast to exist learned. These are skills often learned at home from the family.

A study done on young children of all backgrounds found that children are generally raised in one of two ways:

  1. Concerted Cultivation
  2. Natural Growth

Concerted Tillage involves full-bodied preparation, coaching, getting lessons, and a lot of parental interest.

Natural Growth involves letting children discover on their own, a lot of free time, and little training, coaching, or lessons given to develop and cultivate natural talents.

Based on the study cited, the children raised in an atmosphere of concerted tillage grew up to be much more than alarm, poised, and scored higher on tests given.

Chapter five: The Three Lessons of Joe Flom

By the finish of the affiliate we volition run into that it is possible to take the lessons of Joe Flom and apply them to the legal world of New York Metropolis, and predict the family, background, historic period, and origins of the Urban center's most powerful attorneys without knowing a single additional fact about them.

Lesson #one: The Importance of Beingness Jewish

What started out as adversity concluded upwardly being an opportunity.

The Jewish lawyers of Joe Flom's time had a skill that they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable. That was working in mergers & acquisitions, and hostile takeovers.

Lesson #ii: Demographic Luck

This section is about Maurice Janklow and his son Morton Janklow, partner in Janklow & Nesbit Associates, the largest literary agency in the globe.

Is in that location a perfect time for a New York City lawyer to be built-in? At that place is. Being built-in around 1930 is the platonic date. The nativity charge per unit was lower during this time, therefore they had better opportunities in schooling and the job market due to lower supply and college demand.

Opportunity not just from inside of us, or from our parents, it comes from our time, from what the particular opportunities at a item identify in history present us with.

Lesson #3: The Garment Manufacture and Meaningful Piece of work

From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, the garment trade was the largest industry and most economically vibrant industry in New York City.

Many Jewish immigrants came to America with skills working in the garment industry. This was the perfect skill to have at this time.

Iii qualities that piece of work has to take to be satisfying:

  1. Autonomy
  2. Complication
  3. Connection between effort and reward

Piece of work that fulfills this criteria is meaningful. Work in the garment industry had all of these characteristics.

It is non how much money we brand that makes us happy, information technology is whether our work fulfills us.

Hard work is a prison sentence merely if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you trip the light fantastic toe.

What happened to the children growing up in those homes in the garment manufacture where meaningful work was adept. About all of them became doctors and lawyers. They learned this important lesson: if you work difficult enough, and affirm yourself, and use your listen and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.

Part Two: Legacy

Chapter half-dozen: Harlan, Kentucky

This chapter is about two families that had a tearing feud in Harlan County, Kentucky. They were the Howard and the Turner families.

There are big differences in the cultures of herdsmen and farmers. Farmers rely on the cooperation of others, herdsmen are ordinarily off past themselves. Farmers do not have to worry well-nigh their crops being stolen, but a herdsman does. A herdsman has to be willing to fight at fifty-fifty the slightest challenge.

The culture of award hypothesis says that it matters where you are from, not just in terms of where you lot and your parents grew up, but where your grandparents and nifty, swell, grandparents grew up.

So far we take learned that success arises out of the steady aggregating of advantages. When and where you were born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were like, all make a significant departure in how well y'all practice in the world.

The question for the second function of Outliers is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our fore-bearers can play the same role. Tin we learn something about how people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously?

Chapter 7: The Ethnic Theory of Airplane Crashes

As role of the research for this chapter, Malcolm interviewed Suren Ratwatte, at the time he was a airplane pilot and is now an airline researcher and executive.

Korean Air did non succeed until it best-selling the importance of its cultural legacy.

Plane crashes are most likely to be the issue of an accumulation of minor malfunctions and extenuating circumstances, they are about never the issue of a major mechanical mistake.

A typical crash involves poor weather, a plane behind schedule, a pilot that has been awake for 12 hours or more than, and two pilots that accept never flown together before. The typical plane crash involves seven consecutive human errors.

The kinds of errors that crusade airplane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and advice. One airplane pilot knows something important and somehow doesn't tell the other airplane pilot. Ane pilot does something wrong and the other airplane pilot doesn't grab the error. One example looked at is the crash of Avianca Flight 52.

Mitigated speech refers to any attempt to modify or sugar-coat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we are being polite, or when we are aback, or when we are existence deferential to dominance.

The co-pilots of a aeroplane that crashed had 6 different ways to communicate a betoken, each with dissimilar levels of mitigation.

  1. Command. The most directly and explicit style. Zip mitigation.
  2. Crew obligation argument.
  3. Crew suggestion.
  4. Query.
  5. Preference.
  6. Hint. Most mitigated option.

Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the 2d airplane pilot is non afraid to speak up.

Combating voice communication mitigation has become ane of the great crusades of commercial airlines over the past 15 years. Because of this, every major airline at present has what is called Crew Resource Management Preparation. The program is designed to teach junior crew members how to communicate clearly and assertively. The Wikipedia article on this has a lot of fantastic information on the topic, I encourage you to take a await for further reading.

One example is a standardized procedure for a co-airplane pilot to challenge a pilot if they believe something has gone awry:

  1. "Captain, I'thousand concerned about…"
  2. Then "Captain, I'm uncomfortable with…"
  3. So "Helm, I believe the situation is unsafe…"
  4. If that fails, the first officer is required to take over the airplane.

Since airlines have implemented these procedures to minimize and eliminate speech mitigation, in that location has been a dramatic subtract in airline crashes.

Veteran airplane pilot Suren Ratwatte would tell his co-pilots earlier a flight "I don't fly ofttimes, you fly a lot more than. If you see me doing something stupid, help me out and tell me." He would do this to put himself a little down and encourage them to speak up.

Malcolm talks well-nigh psychologist Geert Hofstede and his cultural dimensions theory that are one of the most widely-used paradigms in cross-cultural psychology.

Three important dimensions from this theory are the power altitude index (PDI), individualism vs. collectivism (IDV), and uncertainty avoidance (UAI).

PDI measures attitudes toward bureaucracy and how much a detail culture values and respects authority.

Several plane crashes that were looked at were the issue of co-pilots from a high PDI state, they had a high respect for authorisation and were afraid to speak upwards when they had concerns.

In near western countries it is the responsibility of the speaker to be understood. If there is confusion it is the fault of the speaker.

Korea, like many Asian countries are receiver oriented. It is up to the speaker to sympathise what is being said.

Boeing published prophylactic information in 1994 showing a articulate correlation between a country'southward plane crashes and its score on Hofstede's dimensions.

Chapter 8: Rice Paddies and Math Tests

No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family unit rich.

This chapter details the complexities of Rice farming and how that correlates to Asians doing ameliorate in worldwide math tests.

Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Near can exist uttered in less than i/4 of a 2d. English equivalents are much longer, ofttimes ane/iii of a second. There is a reproducible correlation between the fourth dimension required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the retentiveness span of its speakers. Residents of Hong Kong have retentivity span of about 10 digits because of the brevity of the number words in Cantonese.

The number naming organization in English language is far more than confusing than the number naming organization in Chinese. The English language number organization is highly irregular. Not so in China, Nihon, and Korea, they accept a logical counting system. That deviation ways that Asian children learn to count much faster than their American counterparts.

Rice farmers improve their yields by becoming smarter, by becoming better managers of their ain time, and past making better choices. Rice agriculture is skill oriented.

Throughout history, people who grow rice accept worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer. Working in a rice field is 10-20 times more than labor intensive than an equivalently sized corn or wheat field. The estimated annual workload of a wet-rice farmer in Asia is 3,000 hours.

Rice farming is meaningful considering:

  1. At that place is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields.
  2. It is complex.
  3. It is autonomous.

Well-nigh every success story in this volume involves someone or some grouping working harder than their peers.

Beingness practiced at mathematics is not and so much ability as attitude. Yous master mathematics if you lot are willing to effort. Success is a part of persistence, doggedness, and a willingness to work difficult.

We should exist able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on endeavor and hard piece of work. Which places are at the acme of both lists? Singapore, South korea, People's republic of china, Taiwan, and Japan.

Affiliate 9: Marita's Bargain

This affiliate opens with an explanation of KIPP Academy Middle School in New York.

Summer vacation is an American legacy that has had profound consequences on the learning patterns of present-day students.

Reading scores from privileged kids increased dramatically over summer breaks, scores from poor students did not.

Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of difference in the style privileged kids learn when they are non in school.

Students in Asian schools do not have long summer vacations. The United states school year is on average 180 days long. The South Korean schoolhouse twelvemonth is 220 days long, the Japanese school twelvemonth is 243 days long.

For its poorest students, America doesn't accept a school problem, information technology has a summer vacation problem. That is the problem the KIPP schoolhouse set out to solve. Kids in the KIPP schoolhouse spend l-60% more time learning than students in the traditional public school.

Marita is a 12 year erstwhile educatee at KIPP. She wakes upward at five:45 am every forenoon and has a packed school schedule that is detailed in this chapter.

Success follows a predictable course. It is non the brightest who succeed. Success is a souvenir. The successful are those who have been given opportunities and who take had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

When we misunderstand or ignore the real lessons of success, we squander talent.

The world we could have is then much richer than the world we have settled for.

Related Volume Summaries

  • Self Help Book Summaries Page
  • Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

Promise you lot enjoyed this and got value from my notes.
This is the 46th book read in my 2020 reading list.
Here is a list of my volume summaries.