Quotes About Outliers

extreme outcomes (both high and low) are more likely to be found in small than in large samples. This explanation is not causal.

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

We were the outliers: my mother was the only Western woman (khawagayya, in Egyptian Arabic) to have married into the family, and during my childhood, we were the only members living outside of Egypt. So between my father's prestige as the eldest son and my own exotic pedigree, I basked in the spotlight.

Diminishing utility. Sometimes, newly introduced performance metrics will have immediate benefits in discovering poorly performing outliers.5 Having gleaned the low-hanging fruit, there is tendency to expect a continuingly bountiful harvest. The problem is that the metrics continue to get collected from everyone. And soon the marginal costs of assembling and analyzing the metrics exceed the marginal benefits.

RULE #4 To have the results The Top 5% of producers have, you must start doing what 95% of people are unwilling to do. As you start to live like this, the majority will call you crazy. Remember that being labeled a freak is the price of greatness.

Outliers: The Story of Success

Terrorists continue to be outliers with limited appeal at best.

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.

Ah, you noticed that black sheep on the hills aren't nearly as plentiful as the white. They're a particularly hardy lot.

odds don't matter. The natural world defies statistics.

Thanos and Adam Warlock are two of a kind because they're both sort of out of the norm: out of the circle of life and death that falls on top of everyone else. Both have had multiple deaths and resurrections, and they always seem to get pulled in as key players for cosmic events.

Portland is where all the fringe groups went to escape. Where the outliers brought that DIY, punk rock attitude and made the city their own.

Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

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.

That seems horribly unfair, and it was. But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.

Malcolm Gladwell

manuscript. Happily, they complied, and Outliers is infinitely

It would be easier to accept that version of events, however, if we hadn't just looked at hockey and soccer players. Theirs was supposed to be a pure meritocracy as well. Only it wasn't. It was a story of how the outliers in a particular field reached their lofty status through

Malcolm Gladwell

But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.

Malcolm Gladwell

Life consists of nothing but exceptions.

Self-proclaimed saviors and other outliers come and go throughout our political history. Occasionally, they're successful; most times, they're not. But the system has rebalanced toward the basic principles of tolerance, freedom and democracy that were set forth by the Founders.

The Weirdest People in the World?"2 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.