Outliers: How do you think extraordinary achievements are achieved? In this book, Malcolm Gladwell has explained the subject very well with real examples from the past to the present. Get ready to learn what it takes to be successful and have real success stories through the Outliers Summary below.
For the PDF file of this book summary, please use the link at the bottom of this page.
Outliers Summary with 20 Lessons Learned
Here are the 20 lessons to learn from Outliers Summary:
#1 One Trait Isn’t Enough to Succeed
Success is achieved by developing many of your good qualities together and working on them for years. Extraordinary achievements, in particular, require more than hard work. You cannot be a successful athlete just because you can run fast or just because you can jump very high. You should have mastered every detail of the sport you are doing and you should have practiced enough to make decisions without thinking.
The reason many athletes, who were seen as very talented as children, are disappointed when they grow up is because they don’t train enough. You cannot become a successful athlete simply by relying on your innate talent, and less talented people can surpass you with years of hard work.
#2 Succeeding by Working
We know that talent alone is not enough, but how long does it take to work? Common ideas and research show that an average of 10000 hours of experience is required to specialize in a job. Also, by working hard, you can surpass people who are more talented than you.
You don’t need innate talent to get a job, you don’t need to be predisposed to your preferred job. Do not fall into the trap of perfection and educate yourself enough to do your dream job in an average way. If you really want and don’t give up, you can come to the level of earning money from your dream job.
#3 What Job Should We Do?
It is not possible to spend 10000 hours of experience on any job you can think of. That’s why you can only give your years if you have a job you love. First, find the area you are passionate about and start working when you are sure.
You cannot find the field you are passionate about by thinking, you can find it by trying different jobs. Go to the theater, maybe you will have a passion for acting, take a boat tour, maybe it will become your passion for sailing. Get a simple camera and stop time. When you find a job that you love, that job will be indispensable for you and you will feel like you came to this world to do that job.
#4 The Impact of Culture on Success
Get to know the lands you were born and raised in well. Because you belong there and you have many features of it. Children growing up in your country may be more inclined to the field of numeracy or literature. You can use this advantage to your advantage. It is like in the example of hundreds of talented football players coming out of Brazil.
First, find out what talents the people in your family have, and it won’t be surprising if you have those talents too. Whatever features are developed in the geography where you live, it is equally high for people with those features to find a job and be successful. Geography can greatly affect your destiny, try to take advantage of this situation.
#5 The Impact of Luck on Success
It may not even be enough for you to be hardworking, disciplined, and talented to achieve extraordinary success. It is not easy to compete with someone who was born in much better conditions than you. You fall behind someone who comes from a wealthy family, has good genes, and is also hardworking. Apart from your effort, your family also has a great influence on your success.
Don’t focus on what others have accomplished, don’t compare yourself to other people. Your success depends on your circumstances. You were not born in the same country as them, you do not have the same living conditions. The average talented son of a football player is more likely to become a football player than the highly talented son of another family.
#6 Early Start Wins
Those who realize their talents and passions at an early age are more successful than those who realize them at a later age. Because success comes with the accumulation of experience. The earlier you start developing your skills, the higher your potential will be. This is how you should guide your children. Worldwide success is achieved with features developed at a young age.
Don’t lose control and treat your kids as a project, forcing them to learn soccer, basketball, tennis, and swimming at the same time. Let life take its course and they will find their own way. All you have to do is support and guide them. If your child wants to be a tennis player, all you have to do is give him/her the best conditions in which he/she can play tennis and learn. You may want him/her to be a basketball player, but remember, it is your dream, not your child’s dream.
#7 Don’t Underestimate Differences
Because Chinese numbers are read shorter than English, Chinese students have a partial advantage over Western students in numerical subjects. They can excel at math just because of a difference in their language.
It is no coincidence that a basketball player who practiced free throws for half an hour after training turned into the best shooter of the team 1 year later. A half-hour job that you add to your schedule can change your whole life. Reading a few pages before going to bed at night and exploring new places at the weekend will provide you with many opportunities.
#8 Social Intelligence
The type of intelligence called IQ reveals your skills in the analytical field, but without your social intelligence, you may not get the opportunities you want in the field you are talented in. Having a weak communication aspect reduces the possibility of giving you a chance in the field you want. That’s why it’s important to have multiple intelligences.
Average talented people with high social intelligence are more successful than people who are highly talented but low on social intelligence. Highly intelligent people are often the best employees of companies, but people with high social intelligence are the owners of companies. Because managing and organizing people makes you the boss, not just being good at math.
#9 Culture and Genetics
Again, something you should be lucky with. Your culture and genetics reveal who you are and what you can achieve. The higher your level becomes, the more important it becomes, as it will continue in the next generations.
Especially genetic factors are very lucky and affect your whole life. Being beautiful, tall, and athletic are the qualities that can completely change your future. But by working hard in different areas, you can surpass people who have such advantages and become very successful.
#10 Doesn’t Happen Without Talent
With disciplined work, you can have above-average skills in any field. It doesn’t matter if it’s sports or art. But if you don’t have a remarkable talent, you can’t go beyond that just by working. Your success remains within certain limits.
Your goal should be to do the job you love well, if you try to be the best at what you do, it can put you under unnecessary stress and cause you to stay away from what you are doing. As long as you compare yourself to others, you cannot reach your potential, focus on your work, only in this way can you achieve success beyond your dreams.
#11 Opportunities
As mentioned earlier in this Outliers Summary, If you have the talent and the time, the opportunities for success increase. Opportunities create other opportunities, as long as you manage to show yourself. The important thing is to seize the first opportunities. The rest goes much easier.
There is a perception that an opportunity comes only once, but this is not entirely true. There are many opportunities in front of a person throughout his/her life, but we do not always understand that the situation we are faced with is an opportunity. We evaluate the events we experience as good or bad, but the results of events that we consider good may be bad, and the results of events that we consider bad may be good. We should always think positively and act accordingly in order to understand the opportunities that come our way.
#12 Satisfaction with Success
As you improve yourself, the work you do should add something to you in the material and spiritual sense, and in the end, it should satiate you for success. It provides this with the freedom and challenges it will give you. Otherwise, it will not be sustainable. You will experience a decline over time and years of effort will be wasted.
As stated earlier in this Outliers Summary, even if you are doing the job you love, living a life without being tied to working hours can make you happier. It doesn’t necessarily have to be like this, but once you experience freedom, you may not want to go back to your office. Even if you cannot make such a change, at least if you live your life by planning, you can use your time more efficiently.
#13 Intelligence Is No Guarantee of Success.
Intelligence only helps you find quick solutions and learn the job fast. Intelligence alone does not bring success. Especially if you want to have outstanding achievements, you should use your intelligence to focus on your business. You should not be content with the intelligence you have, especially you should improve your social intelligence.
People with high intelligence are often the best people to work with people with lower intelligence. They know the job best, produce very good solutions, and can dominate every step of the project, but they may not achieve superior success because they are not good at establishing their own business, leading, or taking responsibility.
#14 Prepare for Disappointment
Great achievements rarely happen. Because it is not enough to have all the good qualities. In addition to these, you must be in the right place and at the right time. Great achievements are not personal, so everyone from your family to your teachers is a part of it.
Do not rely on your abilities and raise your expectations, because there are thousands of factors out there that you cannot think of, and even if one of them comes true, you may have to say goodbye to your dreams. Of course, do not give up on dreaming big, but take your steps firmly, aim to raise one step every day, which is worthwhile to rise at once.
#15 Maintaining Motivation
Children who are fortunate enough to start working at a very young age to achieve extraordinary success may not receive enough support to sustain it. If you help your child stay motivated about his work, everything will go well. You can do this by rewarding him.
That’s why it’s important to do what you love because you can keep working even if your motivation drops. If you need a lot of motivation, you either choose the wrong job or you are looking for motivation in the wrong place. You should find a job that you can enjoy without needing to be applauded by others.
#16 What You Don’t Think About
You cannot imagine many of the obstacles you will encounter on your journey to success. This is a matter of luck. You may even receive the news of the death of the person who will give you a good opportunity at the right time. You must be prepared for anything.
Let’s say you are in the trade, you may have difficulty in supplying the products you sell, or a much better retailer may start doing business in the same field as you. The product you sell may be banned in your country or the manufacturer may raise too much. If you are a manufacturer, you may not be able to find raw materials, you should be prepared for everything and focus on the solution.
#17 Courage
When it comes to courage, believe me, millions of people are eliminated. Because to show your talent, you have to put yourself forward and risk being disgraced. As mentioned in this Outliers Summary, Your voice may be beautiful, but if you hesitate to sing when the microphone is handed to you, that microphone will never come to you again.
Courage doesn’t come out of anywhere, it is developed step by step, you can feel brave when you get angry, but that kind of courage doesn’t do you any good. The courage we are talking about is the courage that will develop you in a positive way, make you stand out, and start over even if you fail.
#18 Changing Ideas Quickly
No big project continues as it first started. It has undergone so many changes over the years that it turns into a completely different project. Don’t be afraid to change your mind. It will take its most correct form over time.
Take a look at the early versions of the projects that are popular today and used by millions of people. You will be surprised to see how different it is from what it is now. This is true for many shopping sites and mobile applications. You start off with a simple and functional idea and do your job well, everything will change over time, the important thing is to adapt to the change.
#19 Working Efficiently
Especially you should do good time management. Everyone has 24 hours, but not everyone can plan it correctly. For some, days are not enough, for others, hours do not pass. Don’t waste your time because there is no repetition of time passed.
If you can use your time well, 24 hours is enough for everything, but if you live unplanned, you will have to postpone your work all the time and once you get procrastination, it will not be easy to get rid of it.
#20 Don’t Forget
Outstanding achievements happen one in a million and are not essential to a happy life. Just do what you love. Let’s say you are passionate about music. Let your aim to produce music, not to give concerts to millions of people. Perhaps you will become the teacher of a very great musician.
Our dreams are the side story of our lives, it is not the right behavior to drop everything and follow our dreams. While you continue to work in your job where you can make a living, you should try to realize your dreams with the increased time and money because your dreams cannot pay your house rent.
If there are lessons you think would be valuable to include in this Outliers book summary, please let us know!
Top 10 Quotes from Outliers
1. “What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they’re like—what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top.”
2. “Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.”
3. “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.”
4. “If you were more than a few years out of college in 1975, then you belonged to the old paradigm. You had just bought a house. You’re married. A baby is on the way. You’re in no position to give up a good job and pension for some pie-in-the-sky $397 computer kit.”
5. “The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority.”
6. “The most important consequence of the miracle of the garment industry, though, was what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced.”
7. “No one rises to the top of the New York legal profession unless he or she is smart and ambitious and hardworking, and clearly the four men who founded the Black Rock firm fit that description.”
8. “When one family fights with another, it’s a feud. When lots of families fight with one another in identical little towns up and down the same mountain range, it’s a pattern.”
9. “The most striking fact about a rice paddy—which can never quite be grasped until you actually stand in the middle of one—is its size. It’s tiny. The typical rice paddy is about as big as a hotel room. A typical Asian rice farm might be composed of two or three paddies.”
10. “Historically, Western agriculture is “mechanically” oriented. In the West, if a farmer wanted to become more efficient or increase his yield, he introduced more and more sophisticated equipment, which allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor: a threshing machine, a hay baler, a combine harvester, a tractor”
Free PDF Download of Outliers Summary to Save or Print
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Malcolm Gladwell’s 10 Rules for Success
Gladwell’s Popular Speech About The Human Potential
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