Outliers: The Story of Success (by Malcolm Gladwell)

1. Notes
2. My top quotes

Notes

The book contains 2 parts: Opportunity and Legacy

1. Opportunity

• Mathew effect
  • Success is the result of ‘‘accumulative advantage’’
  • Someone starts out a little bit better than others. That little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference bigger, and that edge leads to another opportunity, and so on, until that person becomes an outlier.
• The 10,000-hour rule
  • Some people are lucky to get an exposure to their interest early, such as: Bill Gates, Bill Joy, The Beatles, and Mozart.
  • By the time they are in their early twenties, they already have got around 10,000 hours of training.
  • Birth year is also important. For example, if you want to get in on the ground floor in 1975, ideally, you need to be born in 1954 or 1955. Check out birth day of Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, and Eric Schmidt.
• The trouble with geniuses (part 1)
  • IQ has a threshold. Beyond that IQ stops mattering much. Just like basketball, you need to be at least six foot or six one to play. Six three is better than six two, but six eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter.
  • Einstein had an IQ of 150 and Langan has an IQ of 195. Einstein won a Nobel Prize, but Langan did not.
  • 2 kinds of IQ tests: convergence and divergence.
    • Convergence test measures the IQ level that we usually talk about
    • Divergence test measures how creative one person is. For example, name as many different uses of a brick.
    • The ‘‘brick test’’ maybe a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability.
• The trouble with geniuses (part 2)

My top quotes

• '’… no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.’’

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