Outliers Quotes

We are a very like-minded group, the senior members of this government. The outliers are not very far away from the mainstream. ~ Tony Abbott

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

We're the outliers. The rejects. We're free. Free to do whatever the hell we want, because it won't matter. We'll never fit in here, so we don't have to try. We're liberated from all this bullshit." He motioned around us with his hand. "They can't hurt you if you don't give them permission to. ~ L.J. Shen

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers. ~ James S.A. Corey

I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing ... It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

All statistics have outliers. Money management, therefore, is key to the process of good trading. ~ Yvan Byeajee

The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Before we move on, let me clarify that there is a fundamental difference between what we do and how predictable we are. When it comes to things we do-like the distances we travel, the number of e-mails we send, or the number of calls we make-we encounter power laws, which means that some individuals are significantly more active than others. They send more messages; they travel farther. This also means that out-liers are normal-we expect to have a few individuals, like Hasan, who cover hundreds or even thousands of miles on a regular basis.

But when it comes to the predictability of our actions, to our surprise power laws are replaced by Gaussians. This means that whether you limit your life to a two-mile neighborhood or drive dozens of miles each day, take a fast train to work or even commute via airplane, you are just as predictable as everyone else. And once Gaussians dominate the problem, outliers are forbidden, just as bursts are never found in Poisson's dice-driven universe. Or two-mile-tall folks ambling down the street are unheard of. Despite the many differences between us, when it came to our whereabouts we are all equally predictable, and the unforgiving law of statistics forbids the existence of individuals who somehow buck this trend. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

I highly recommend Marci Alboher's One Person/ Multiple Careers. It includes lots of practical strategies for living the slash. Malcom Gladwell is also a constant source of inspiration for me. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposes that there are three criteria for meaningful work - complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward - and that these can often be found in creative work.2 These criteria absolutely fit with what cultivating meaningful work means in the context of the Wholehearted journey. Last, I think everyone should read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist3 - I try to read it at least once a year. It's a powerful way of seeing the connections between our gifts, our spirituality, and our work (slashed or not) and how they come together to create meaning in our lives. ~ Brene Brown

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151) ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

We overlook just how large a role we all play
and by 'we' I mean society
in determining who makes it and who doesn't. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

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. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

when you read findings like the one above, and see that Jamal doesn't get the job, it's easy to shake your head at the few racist hiring managers who've tilted the odds against him. But the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn't a problem of outliers. It is pervasive. ~ Christian Rudder

A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

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? ~ Malcolm Gladwell

My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

But know this: as far as a music culture goes, EDM is the one who will accept the kids on the outliers, the ones who get bullied, the ones who feel like they may not quite fit in. This community is exceptional in its ability to bond all types together, and I am not exaggerating when I say it saves lives. Our audience is intelligent and kind, discriminating only in regards to which sound they like best. Our audience is unprecedented in their drive to proactively support each other. ~ Kaskade

When you get into statistical analysis, you don't really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by 'The Onion' - or be the subject of a cartoon in 'The New Yorker.' I guess I'm kind of an outlier there. ~ Nate Silver

People don't rise from nothing, ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Catholics believed in life at conception. Muslims believed that it took forty-two days after conception for Allah to send an angel to transform sperm and egg into something alive...There were the outliers, too - the ancient Greeks, who said that a fetus had a "vegetable" soul, and the Jews, who said that the soul came at birth….Still, it didn't really make sense, did it? How could the moment that life began differ so much, depending on the point of view? How could the law in Mississippi say that an embryo was a human being, but the law in Massachusetts disagreed? ~ Jodi Picoult

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem. ~ Aaron Levie

The truly creative people tend to be outliers. ~ Nolan Bushnell

the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn't a problem of outliers. It is pervasive. We've seen the same patterns repeated on three different sites, with different users and different experiences: men, women, free, subscription-only, casual, serious, "urban" demographics, and more "mainstream." All told, the research set represents a large chunk of the young adults in this country, and the data uniformly shows non-blacks discount African American profiles. It's not a problem caused by a small cluster of "ugly" black users or by a small group of unreformed racists throwing off an otherwise regular pattern. ~ Christian Rudder

When you delight the weird, the overlooked and the outliers, they are significantly more likely to talk about you and recommend you. ~ Seth

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

America is an outlier in the world of democracies when it comes to the structure and conduct of elections. ~ Thomas E. Mann

The book 'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000-hour theory–that almost anyone can master a skill if they dedicate 10,000 hours to it. The same is true for your side hustle. If you put in the right hours–into the right places–then you can build a successful side hustle, too.

The rate at which you put these hours in is up to you. Yes, if you go slower, then it will take longer. But compared to your other option–doing nothing at all–what's the hurry?

Here's the tried and true technique I use to put the necessary time into any new project without overwhelming myself:

Set aside 20 minutes–no more!–every single day to work on your project, and protect those 20 minutes with everything you have. Never let anything get in the way of this time. ~ Rebecca Scott

All the outliers we've looked at so far were the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity. Lucky breaks don't seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and star athletes. They seem like the rule. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity. ~ V.S. Ramachandran