Outliers Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Outliers

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Zusammenfassung von Outliers

Name: Outliers
Rating: 4.2 (875 reviews)
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell

The Story of Success

4.2 (875 Bewertungen)

16 Min.

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Success Confidence Personality

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Outliers
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What’s in it for me? Learn why “self-made” success is a myth.

Have you ever read a biography of a successful person where his or her success is attributed to pure dumb luck? Probably not. Rather, when it comes to success stories, we like to think that the people in question have earned their success through talent and hard work. This is the myth of the “self-made man,” and these blinks will show you that it lacks foundation. You’ll see how many unseen factors influence a person’s success, and most of them lie beyond that person’s control.

In these blinks you’ll learn

why Bill Gates and The Beatles became so successful;
why your birthday may have doomed you to never become an ice hockey superstar; and
what rice farming has to do with math skills.

Our culture celebrates the myth of the “self-made man.”

If we meet an excellent mathematician, we tend to assume his talent for logical thinking is, at its core, something he was born with. The same goes for professional athletes’ agility, musicians’ sense of rhythm, or computer programmers’ problem-solving skills.

This is because we naturally tend to attribute an individual’s success or achievement to his or her own efforts and innate abilities.

When Jeb Bush ran for the governorship of Florida, he called himself a “self-made man” as part of his campaign strategy. This is, frankly, ridiculous; he had two American Presidents, a wealthy Wall Street banker, and a United States senator in his immediate family. Nevertheless, as individualism is so important in our culture, he tried this angle anyway.

Jeb Bush’s achievements make him an outlier – a person who has achieved something statistically extraordinary. But just as Bush’s advantageous background helped him achieve success, so too do less external factors help other outliers rise above the average.

We place such a high value on individuals and their “self-made” achievements that we often willfully ignore other factors.

The “self-made man” is a myth – a very, very popular myth.

Once you reach a certain threshold, increased abilities no longer help you succeed.

Though innate qualities are important, being 6’10” tall doesn’t guarantee you a million-dollar basketball contract, and having a sky-high IQ doesn’t automatically mean a Nobel Prize. Why is this?

Qualities that foster success – like height in basketball players or quantitative intelligence in mathematicians – have a “threshold.” For example, after reaching a certain height, an extra couple of inches don’t make that much difference for a basketball player.

World-class mastery of anything demands around 10,000 hours of practice – no easy feat.

Though talent is certainly a key ingredient in the recipe for success, hard work seems to be at least as important, if not more so. Bill Gates spent a lot of time learning computer programming. The Beatles spent a lot of time on stage. Though they were also extraordinarily talented individuals, it was extensive practice that made them truly world-class.

To achieve world-class mastery at anything, studies show you need to spend a “critical minimum” amount of time – around 10,000 hours – practicing. Of course, not everyone has the opportunity to spend this much time practicing something.

The month you’re born in can have a huge effect on what you achieve.

Your “relative age” – how old you are in comparison to others in a developmental group – can make or break you.

Here’s an example: in Canadian youth-hockey leagues, the eligibility cutoff date for age groups is January 1. All the kids born in the same calendar year compete against each other. Seems fair, right?

How you’re brought up can radically impact how successful you become.

After you reach a skills “threshold,” natural abilities stop mattering in your quest for success. A far more important factor is whether you have practical intelligence.

Practical intelligence is “procedural” knowledge: knowing how to interpret and work social situations to get what you want – in other words, knowing who to ask what, and when. The ability to interact with and negotiate with authority figures can help inch people closer to their goals.

The year you’re born in can make or break you.

“Unfair” advantages in life can come from very unlikely sources.

Consider several big-name software billionaires: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and co-founder of Sun-Microsystems, Bill Joy. All of them were born with an extraordinary gift for logical reasoning as well as ambition, practical intelligence and opportunities to practice their skills. Mystery of the wildly successful solved?

Where you come from – geographically and culturally – can have a particularly large effect on what you achieve.

You’re probably familiar with the stereotype that Asians are good at math. Some might cry, “Politically incorrect!” when they hear this, but several facets of Eastern culture do in fact promote better math students. One is language. When children learn the words for numbers in Asian languages, they automatically learn to add up numbers too, thus developing their mathematical aptitude early on.

In addition to language, rice – the staple of the Asian diet – also helps students learn math because rice farming fosters an intense work ethic. Farming rice is much harder than farming Western crops. A robust, profitable rice harvest demands precision, coordination and patience.

If we recognize the importance of cultural legacy, we can help more people work towards success – and prevent failure.

There are not-so-celebrated outliers too, such as plane crashes. This rare event almost always results from the buildup of an unlikely series of minor difficulties or errors that might have been insignificant on their own. But just as Bill Gates was lucky to encounter one opportunity after another, pilots can run into a series of small problems that add up to disaster.

An example is Korean Air, an airline that, before the year 2000, had a terrible safety record. Their crash-rate was more than seventeen times higher than the industry average. This poor track record could also be explained by cultural legacy, as with the Asian predisposition for math.

If we recognize the reasons behind uneven playing fields, we can create more opportunities for people to succeed.

The processes we use to whittle fledgling talent into success stories are rarely effective or efficient, resulting in only a few successful outliers.

In hockey, annual cutoff dates mean juniors born late in the year must play against kids almost a year older than they are. But a Canadian hockey player born on December 27 can’t ask his mom to travel back in time and not go into labor until January 1, and he shouldn’t have to wish he could.

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

No man, woman or Canadian hockey player is an island. Extraordinary success is the result of an often-unlikely series of opportunities, lucky breaks and occurrences that combine to create the precise conditions that allow such achievement.

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Worum geht es in Outliers?

Outliers is an examination of individuals who achieve a level of success – in math, sports, law, or any pursuit, really – so extraordinary that it lies outside the realm of normal experience.

We often think these outliers possess some mysterious innate ability that helps them rise to the top of their fields, but other factors, like family, culture or even birthdates, can have a huge effect on success, too.

Bestes Zitat aus Outliers

Practice isnt the thing you do once youre good. Its the thing you do that makes you good.

—Malcolm Gladwell

Wer Outliers lesen sollte

Anyone who wants to deepen his or her understanding of success and of how to achieve it
Teachers, coaches and others in training professions
Consulting professionals and others interested in policy reform

Über den Autor

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. He began his career in journalism as a reporter covering business and science for the Washington Post. In 2005, he was on Time Magazine’s list the 100 Most Influential People.

In addition to Outliers, Gladwell has written several other bestsellers, including The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.

Kategorien mit Outliers

Communication Skills Motivation & Inspiration Psychology

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