Each month, founder of Cardinal Rule Press, Maria Dismondy, will be reviewing business books she is currently reading. Along with a brief review, she is sharing some of her favorite quotes from the book.

OUTLIERS

Summary:

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers” – the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Maria’s Review:

Need inspiration to be successful no matter the upbringing you were given? This is the book. This book proves that it’s not where we came from that makes us successful, but what we do with where we came from.

Top 10 Favorite Quotes:

1. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
2. “Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.” and “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.”
3. “Achievement is talent plus preparation”
4. “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
5. “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?”
6. “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.”
7. “The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”
8. “For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. 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 role preparation seems to play.”
9. “IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savvy is knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.
10. “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

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