Currently the most highlighted Kindle passages from Outliers: The Story of Success, By Malcolm Gladwell. For other books, go HERE.
Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”
Highlighted by 1659 Kindle users
Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
Highlighted by 1161 Kindle users
Their research suggestes that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, 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.
Highlighted by 1151 Kindle users
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
Highlighted by 948 Kindle users
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
Highlighted by 2269 Kindle users
Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
Highlighted by 3466 Kindle users
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.
Highlighted by 1297 Kindle users
if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.
Highlighted by 1438 Kindle users
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.
Highlighted by 1472 Kindle users
Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
Highlighted by 1984 Kindle users