Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell
I read this book a while ago but never wrote highlights for it! Must have forgot but I was looking through some old books and found Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. I remember finding this book interesting because of how all the math and logic added up for the exceptions told in this book and also because of the things I never would have thought about if I didn’t read this book – the outliers.
Highlights
- This is a book about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary.
- The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in way we cannot begin to imagine.
- If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things – things that have nothing to do with intelligence – must start to matter more. It’s like basketball: once someone is tall enough, then we start to care about speed and court sense and agility and ball handling skills and shooting touch.
- Three things most people would agree that work has to have if it is to be satisfying: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward.
- Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation – that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. Western cultural context holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker.
- Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.
It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.
*I take no credit for any of these points.