Outlier(Part One -- Opportunity)

Introduction

out-li-er. noun
1: something that is situated away from or classed differ-ently from a main or related body
2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in
value from the others of the sample

No one used to thinking about health in terms of community.

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical estab­lishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to nderstand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround urselves with have a pro­found effect on who we are.

In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health.

Part One -- Opportunity

1. The Matthew Effect

"FOR UNTO EVERYONE THAT HATH SHALL
BE GIVEN, AND HE SHALL HAVE ABUNDANCE,
BUT FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT SHALL BE
TAKEN AWAY EVEN THAT WHICH HE HATH."
— MATTHEW 25:29 "

1. People 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. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achieve­ment in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
2. the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. **We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid? **
3. In the beginning, his advantage isn't so much that he is inherently better but only that he is a little older. But by the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt,
   he really is better, so he's the one more likely to make it to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big leagues."
4. Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age dis­tributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience.
5. 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.
6. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulative advantage." The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another pportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still—and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn't start out an out­lier. He started out just a little bit better.
7. Those were the ingredients of success at the high­est level: passion, talent, and hard work

2. The 10,000-Hour Rule

"IN HAMBURG, WE HAD TO PLAY FOR EIGHT HOURS."

1. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do—the innately talented ones.
2. And without that extra practice, he has no chance at hitting ten thousand hours by the time the professional hockey teams start looking for players.
   And without ten thousand hours under his belt, there is no way he can ever master the skills necessary to play at the top level.
3. 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.
4. Bill Joy was brilliant. He wanted to learn. That was a big part of it. **But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert. **
5. If you were born in the late 1840s you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820s you were too old: your mind-set was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm. But there was a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just perfeet for seeing the potential that the future held. All of the fourteen men and women on the list above had vision and talent.
6. **These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of
   age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. **Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

3. The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1

"KNOWLEDGE OF A BOY'S IQ IS OF LITTLE HELP IF YOU ARE FACED WITH A FORMFUL OF CLEVER BOYS."

1. Terman didn't understand what a real outlier was, and that's a mistake we continue to make to this day. The relationship between suc­cess and IQ works only up to a point. A basketball player only has to be tall enough—and the same is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a threshold.
2. Divergence vs Convergence.
3. They(miniority students) are just as successful as white students. And why? Because even though the academic credentials of minority students at Michigan aren't as good as those of white students, the quality of students at the law school is high enough that they're still above the threshold.

4. The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2

"AFTER PROTRACTED NEGOTIATIONS, IT WAS AGREED THAT ROBERT WOULD BE PUT ON PROBATION."

1. Practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing how to say it for maximum effect". General intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal". Social savvy is knowledge. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shutting them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn't just issue commands.
2. Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation". It's an attempt to actively "foster and assess a children's talents, opinions and skills". Poor parents tend to follow , by contrast, a strategy of "Accomplishment of natural growth". They see as responsibly to care for their children but to let them to grow and develop on their own.
3. It's a cultural advantage. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he's wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because -- and perhaps this is even more critical -- the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.
4. It's the culture that you find yourself in that determines that. The issue with Chris is that he was always too bored to actually sit there and listen to his teachers. If someone has recognised his intelligence and if he was from a family where there was some kind of value on education, they would have made sure he wasn't bored.
5. In the end, only one thing mattered: family background. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we'd only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one -- not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses -- ever makes it alone.

5. The Three Lessons of Joe flom

1. That seems horribly unfair, and it was. But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity. Once you get the reputation for doing that kind of work, the business comes to you first.
2. He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up as being an opportunity. It's that they had a skill that they had been working for years that was suddenly very valuable..
3. There's another way to break down the Terman results, though, and that's by when the Termites were born. That was a very tough period. My father would have been more successful in a different kind of world.
4. There is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants arrived at perfect time, with the perfects skills. To exploit that opportunity, you had to have certain virtues, and those immigrant worked hard. They sacrificed. They scrimped and saved and invested wisely. But still, you have to remember that the garment industry in those years was growing by leaps and bounds. They economy was desperate for the skills that they possessed.
5. There is a complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that's worth more to most of us than money. Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.
6. If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.
7. Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professional because of their origins.
8. No one rises to the top of the New York legal profession unless he or she is smart and ambitious and hardworking, and clearly the four men who founded the Black Rock firm fit that description.
9. This person's parent will have done meaningful work in the garment business, passing on to their children autonomy and complexity and the connection between effort and reward.
10. Their world -- their culture and generation and family history -- gave them the greatest of opportunities.

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create time: 2016-11-3