Outliers Quotes

“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

“If you work hard enough, assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”

“Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

“Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.”

“But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert.”

“When and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were make a significant difference in how well you do in the world.”

“It’s not so much ability as attitude.”

“The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”

“The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

“It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”

“We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.”

“It is not the brightest who succeed. ... Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those that have been given an opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”

“Achievement is talent plus preparation.”

“The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.”

“The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”

“Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”

“Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”