Quotes About Achievement

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it's the biggest nine-and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulative advantage.

Gosh darn it," Gau said, "if you don't try, you'll never succeed." 10.

That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren't much good until late in their careers.

complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

the sense of entitlement [...] is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world

there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success. 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.

the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over the course of the Computer Center's life, thousands of students passed

Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it.

We have seen, Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds.

Malcolm Gladwell

far in Outliers, we've seen that extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity. In this chapter, I want to try to dig deeper into why that's the case by looking at the outlier in its purest and most distilled form—the genius. For years, we've taken our

home. What did two of Louis and Regina Borgenicht's sons do? They went to law school, and no less than nine of their grandchildren ended up as doctors and lawyers as well. Here is the most remarkable of Farkas's family trees. It belongs to a Jewish family from

The people at the top don't just work harder. They work much, much harder.

rep" squad—the all-star

Malcolm Gladwell

eight-year-old because he's too small. So he doesn't get the extra practice. And without that extra practice, he has no chance at hitting ten thousand hours by the time the professional hockey teams start looking for players. And without ten thousand hours under his belt, there is no way he can ever master the skills necessary to play at the top level. Even Mozart—the greatest musical prodigy of all time—couldn't hit his stride until he had his ten

According to the law professor Richard Sander, more than half of all African-American law students in the United States—51.6 percent—are in the bottom 10 percent of their law school class and almost three-quarters fall in the bottom 20 percent.

Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance

It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make

Malcolm Gladwell