Outliers Quotations
1) “The way Canadians select hockey players is a beautiful example of what the
sociologist Robert Merton famously called a ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ – a situation
where ‘a false definition, in the beginning… evokes a new behavior which makes the
original false conception come true.’ Canadians start with a false definition of who
the best nine- and ten-year-old hockey players are. They’re just picking the oldest
every year. But the way they treat those ‘all-stars’ ends up making their original
false judgment look correct. As Merton puts it: ‘This specious validity of the selffulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual
course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning’” (25, footnote).
2) “What Hudson is saying is that IQ is a lot like height in basketball. Does someone
who is five foot six have a realistic chance of playing professional basketball? Not
really. You need to be at least six foot or six one to play at that level, and, all things
being equal, it’s probably better to be six two than six one, and better to be six three
than six two. But past a certain point, height stops mattering so much. A player who
is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter.
(Michael Jordan, the greatest player ever, was six six after all.) A basketball player
only has to be tall enough—and the same is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a
threshold” (80).
3) “…Flom and his ilk weren’t merely lucky. Lucky is winning the lottery. They
were given an opportunity, and they seized it. As Wald says: ‘Jewish lawyers were
lucky and they helped themselves. That’s the best way to put it. They took
advantage of the circumstances that came their way. The lucky part was the
unwillingness of the WASP firms to step into takeover law. But that word luck fails
to capture the work and the efforts and the imagination and the acting on
opportunities that might have been hidden and not so obvious” (129).
4) “The ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis says that it matters where you’re from, not
just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of
where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even
where your great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful
fact… Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that
are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of
the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific”
(170 & 204).
5) “We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You
either have ‘it’ or you don’t. But to Schoenfeld, it’s not so much ability as attitude.
You master mathematics if you are willing to try… 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” (246).
6) “It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there
with Einstein. 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 who have been given
opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them”
(267).