Malcolm Gladwell starts with a clear goal for this book. He argues that to understand success, we should not just understand an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation, but also look beyond the individual to -

• The culture they were a part of
• Who their friends and families were
• What town their families came from

Looking at these factors is essential because we need to learn that the values of the world we live in and the people we surround ourselves with profoundly affect who we are.

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

Illustrations

He illustrates this point through well-researched examples of famous people from a wide variety of industries.

• Canadian Star Hockey players – an incredible number of them are born in the first three months of the calendar year. So what? – players born in these months get the advantage of more hours training and, therefore, a better head start than kids born later.

The 10000-hour practice opportunity

• Mozart, his most outstanding works, happened after he was composing for more than twenty years.
• Bobby Fischer, a chess grandmaster, made it to the elite level after nine years.
• Bill Joy, one of the most prominent people of the modern history of computing - happened to be studying at the Michigan University that was in the 70’s one of the first universities to switch over to time-sharing. He managed to write program eight to ten hours a day before going to Berkeley.
• The Beatles, before they got established, played at Hamburg at a strip club for eight hours a day, seven days a week.
• Bill gates had multiple lucky breaks that got him into programming and helped gain ten thousand hours of advantage even before making his own software company.

Geniuses may be born, but practical intelligence is more important. It can be measured like your IQ.

No one can make it alone.

Lessons about Culture

In the 1950s, if you were a Fortune 500 company and you were involved in a takeover on any side, Joseph Flom was the man you were hiring.

• He had the advantage of being a Jew. (why advantage, because in the 1950s takeovers were considered hostile and so nobody took them and so they were handed down to Flom)
• He had The opportunity of being born at the perfect time for lawyers. Being born after the Great Depression and World War II was a great advantage here.

Another opportunistic success was the Jewish immigrants who arrived at the perfect time with the perfect skills and set up a garment business. The American economy was desperate for their skills.

So here, culture and family history has made available a great opportunity.

About Work

The three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward are the three qualities that work must have if it is to be satisfying. Work that fulfills these three criteria is meaningful.

It is not the measure of money we make that eventually makes us happy in our jobs. It’s whether our work fulfills us.

If you work hard, assert yourself and use your mind, creative energy and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.

The importance of Legacy

Plane crashes – the Koreans had maximum plane crashes in a particular era. Gladwell accounts for these catastrophes to the absence of clear (mitigated or sugar-coated) communication in the cockpit. And not to anything technical. Koreans had a way of speaking to those higher in rank, so they never asserted themselves with aggression. Respect for authority was inherent in their culture.

But they turned it over by accepting their cultural legacy, retraining their officers in mitigation in the cockpit. Aviation experts concur.

He concludes that each of us has a distinct personality. But on top of that he says are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of our community we grew up in, and those differences are very specific.

We shouldn’t be squeamish about who we are and where we are from culturally. We should appreciate our strengths and weaknesses and tendencies.

Lessons from the early risers club

The southern Chinese farmers knew the importance of hard work. 3000 hours a year in their rice paddies of meaningful work.

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

Lessons from the KIPP Academy

This school revolutionized education for the lower class by focusing on a seldom mentioned topic in American schools – summer vacation. A student Marita from a low-income group demonstrated - Two lessons learned previously have been put to use. One accepting the cultural difference, wealthier kids did activities in summer that were not available to lower classes. Second, the rice padding lessons of- "work hard year- round" were put to use by using weekends and summer vacations.

It demonstrates all the above observations with another personal story – his mother’s story. Her success has been a culmination of accepting where we are from. It has been an amalgamation of multiple people's contributions, not individual efforts, taking privileges of cultural background and legacy, although the story began with a morally complex act.

Conclusion

• Success follows a predictable course.
• It is not the brightest who succeed.
• Meaningful work is miraculous.
• Nor is success individual or the sum of decisions and efforts we make on our own.
• Outliers are those that are given opportunities and who then have the strength and sound mind to seize them.

Other Books by Malcolm Gladwell you should read