Outliers

cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.

To come to New York City in the 1890s with a background in dressmaking or sewing or Schnittwaren Handlung was a stroke of extraordinary good fortune. It was like showing up in Silicon Valley in 1986 with ten thousand hours of computer programming already under your belt.

Then the world

you are someone whose father has made his way up in the business world, then you’ve seen, firsthand, what it means to negotiate your way out of a tight spot.

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.

Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

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

The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.

Alan Schoenfeld, a math professor at Berkeley,