The document discusses factors beyond innate talent that contribute to success, as explored in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers". It summarizes that outliers benefit from advantageous circumstances like birth order affecting sports selection, access to computers shaping Bill Gates' career, and cultural legacies from rice farming improving math skills. The key idea is that success is predictable and comes down more to preparing and maximizing opportunities, not just raw talent alone. Ten thousand hours of practice is cited as important for expertise in most fields.

1. OUTLIERS
The Story of Success
By: Malcolm Gladwell

2. Outliers
• Outliers are men and women who do things out of
the ordinary
• To understand why certain people become
outliers we must look at factors beyond innate
talent. We must also look at:
 Where they were reared
 When they grew up
 The culture they belonged to
 The characteristics passed down by their
forebears

3. The Ecology of Organisms
• The tallest tree in the forest probably came
from a hardy acorn, but other factors also
contributed to its height. Such factors as:
 No other trees blocked sunlight from getting through to
the tree
 The soil around the tree was rich in nutrients
 No animals chewed through its bark when it was a young
tree
 No one cut it down before it matured

4. The Effect of Birth Dates
• An analysis of a highly successful Canadian
hockey team found:
 40% of the players were born between January and March
 30% were born between April and June
 20% were born between July and September
 10% were born between October and December

5. The Effect of Birth Dates
• In Canada the eligibility cut off for
age-class (club) hockey is January 1
• Those players born early in the year are bigger and
more mature than those born later in the year
• As a consequence, the older players perform better and
are picked for advanced placement where they receive
better coaching and more playing time

6. Summary of the Effects of Age
• If you make a decision about who is talented and who is
not at an early age
and
• You separate the “talented” from the “untalented” and
provide the talented ones with superior experiences
• You will give a huge advantage to those born shortly
after the cutoff date

7. The “Matthew Effect”
• “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and
he shall have abundance. But from him that
hath not shall be taken away even which he
hath.”
• The rich have a natural advantage
• The best students get the best teachers and the
most attention

8. • “People don’t rise from nothing.”
• “We do owe something to parentage and
patronage. ”The people who stand before kings
may look like they did it all by themselves.
• But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of
hidden advantage and extraordinary
opportunities and cultural legacies that allow
them to learn and work hard and make sense of
the world in ways others cannot.”
The “Matthew Effect”

9. Accumulative Advantage
Some people start off a little bit superior
to their peers
This initial small difference leads to more
opportunities, which makes them more
superior, which leads to more
opportunities, etc., etc., etc.

10. Ingredients of Success at a highest
LEVEL
passion talent Hidden
opportunites
hardwork

11. The 10,000 Hour Rule
• The closer psychologists look at the careers of outliers,
the less important is innate talent and the more
important is preparation
• Ten thousand hours is the magic number for expertise in
most areas
• Before they became famous, the Beatles played eight
hours a day, seven days a week in a club in Hamburg

12. Beatles
✘ Came to USA in 1964
✘ In 1960 they were a struggling school rock band
✘ Were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany
✘ They were asked to play hour after hour to catch the passing
traffic
✘ In Liver pool they played one hour session
✘ In Hamburg, they played seven nights a week , 8 hours a day
✘ On their first trip they played 106 nights – 5 or more hours a night
✘ In just over a year and a half, they played performed 270 nights
✘ By 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1200 times
✘ Most bands don’t do that in their entire career

13. The 10,000 Hour Rule
• Mozart , didn’t produce his greatest work
until he had been composing for more than
20 years
 Music Teachers = 4,000 hours
 Good Musicians = 8,000 hours
 Great Musicians = 10,000 hours / 10 Years
 There are no prodigies
10,000 hours = 3 hours/day x 10 years
Learning: Practice

14. Gates’ Advantage
• Parents – Wealthy Lawyer/Banker’s daughter
• 7th grade - Private School/Computer club
• 1968 - Mother’s Club bought computer terminal for mainframe in
downtown Seattle
• U. Wash – Computer Center Corp. – leased mainframe time
(founder’s son @ same school)
• ISI – Free time for working on payroll app
• TRW – Independent study semester, writing code for Bonneville
power station app
• Dropped out of Harvard – had 7 years’ programming experience

15. The Effect of Timing
 If you were too old for the personal
computer revolution in 1975 you were
probably born before 1952
 If you were born after 1959 you were probably too young
 Leaders of the personal computer revolution:
• Bill Gates – 1955 (Microsoft)
• Paul Allen – 1953 (Microsoft #2)
• Steve Ballmer – 1956 (Microsoft #24)
• Steve Jobs – 1955 (Apple)
• Eric Schmidt – 1955 (PARC, Sun (Java), Novell, Google)
The most important date in the history of the personal
computer revolution is January 1975 when the Altair
8800 was introduced

16. 1860s & 70 s
• Greatest change in American History
 Railroads
 Wall street
 Industrial manufacturing
 Rules of traditional economy were broken
• How old were you when the transformation
happened
• Born in the 40’s – too young
• Born in the 20’s – too old

17. 1860s & 70 s
• Rockefeller – 1839 ( standard oil)
• Andrew Carnegie – 1835 ( Steel )
• Fredrick Weyerhaeuser – 1834
• Jay Gould – 1836 ( Union pacific)
• Marshal Field – 1834 (
• George baker – 1840 ( rail road of NJ)
• Hetty Green – 1834 ( Bank)
• James Fair – 1831 ( Virginia mining)
• Henry Rogers – 1840 ( standard oil company)
• JP Morgan – 1837 ( general electric)
• Oliver Payne – 1839 (Standard oil company)
• George Puliman – 1831 ( Pull man)
• Peter Arrell – 1834 (American Tobacco)
• Philip Armour – 1832 ( Armour refrigerator)

18. The Trouble with Geniuses, part 1
• Average IQ = 100
• Einstein IQ = 150
• Henry Crowell IQ = 140
• Chris Langan IQ = 195
Nothing can hold folks this smart back, right?
It is more about opportunity than it is about talent!

19. The Trouble with Geniuses, part 1
“A basketball player only has to be tall enough”
“A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely
to win a Nobel Prize as one whose IQ is 180.”
Liam Hudson
“The relationship between success and IQ works only
up to a point.”
You only have to be smart enough!

20. The Trouble with Geniuses, part 2
Two types of Parenting
• Heavily involved and scheduled
 Creates the right to pursue their individualism
• Not involved and unscheduled
 Creates a sense of distance
• It is not genetic, its not racial, its cultural
• Terman found that “almost none of the genius
children from the lowest social and economic class
ended up making a name for themselves.”

21. The ethnic theory of plane crashes
• Late 90s – Korean airlines- statistically far too many
crashes
• The planes are not poor quality, it is the people and the
process
• Korean culture-person with higher authority should be
questioned
Effect of culture was responsible for the plane
crash

22.  It takes a series of events (7)
 Hierarchy
 Cultural communications
 Cultural ambiguity
You must communicate up and down the
hierarchy and across the cultural highway
The ethnic theory of plane crashes

23. Cultures that encourage passive submission to
hierarchy, or who phrase their questions in
subtle, vague euphemisms, may find
themselves at a disadvantage in some
situations, such as the airplane cockpit.

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

25. Rice Paddies and Math Tests
• Rice farmers have had to work harder than every
other farmer.
• Growing rice requires perfectionism and constant
vigilance. There are no vacations.
• The days are long with no exception. And the
harder a farmer works to optimize his rice paddy,
the more rice that paddy will produce.
• Some estimate that the average workload of a
wet-rice farmer in Asia is three thousand hours a
year.

26. Rice Paddies and Math Tests
• Chinese children can learn to count to 40 two
years earlier than American children on
average.
• The system is what psychologists call
“transparent.”
• The rules are clear enough for very young
children to understand counting, addition, and
multiplication much more easily.

27. • Though we often think of facility with math to be a
kind of innate trait, it turns out that being good at
math is a lot like being good at piloting: math
skills are not the only thing that matters.
• In fact, persistence is an excellent predictor of
someone’s math skills.
• This makes the cultural legacy of rice farming all
the more relevant to mathematical skill—they
both require dedication, persistence, and lots of
practice to perfect.
Rice Paddies and Math Tests

28. Researchers have found that one of the
most reliable predictors of whether or
not a student will be good at math is not
their IQ or the quality of their schooling.
It is their willingness to complete tasks
carefully.

29. Outliers take maximum advantage of
the opportunities that are made
available to them
• Success is predictable
• It is not the brightest who succeed