Quotes About Success

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

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.

But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.

They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn't starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn't have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings.

To become a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity, because the deep respect for authority that runs throughout Korean culture simply does not work in the cockpit.

We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. 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.

Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy

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

No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.?

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with.

No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich ~ Chinese proverb

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

We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by "we" I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn't.

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

The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.

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

weeks' work. Kmart paid—happily. If its attorneys do not outsmart you, they will outwork you, and if they can't outwork you, they'll win through sheer intimidation. There is no firm in the world that has made more money, lawyer for lawyer, over the past two decades. On Joe Flom's wall

public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School. The fourth partner was George Katz. He was born in 1931. He grew up in a one-bedroom first-floor apartment in the Bronx. His parents were

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

rep" squad—the all-star

Malcolm Gladwell