Outliers summary

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.

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.

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?

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.

“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?

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.

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.

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.

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.