Quotes About Success

The answer, of course, is neither. No one is failing anyone. It's just that the very thing that makes elite schools such wonderful places for those at the top makes them very difficult places for everyone else.

what's interesting about that list? Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen

to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer.

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures.

The standard immigrant-entrepreneur story is about the redemptive power of grit and ingenuity.

Malcolm Gladwell

Everything we have learned in Outliers say that success follows a predictable course. It's 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: The successful are those who have been given opportunities, and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

Success is the result of what sociologists like to call accumulative advantage.

But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert.

we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.

way the world of classical music picks its future virtuosos, or the way the world of ballet picks its future ballerinas, or the way our elite educational system picks its future scientists and intellectuals. You can't buy your way into Major Junior A hockey. It doesn't matter who your father or mother is, or who your grandfather was, or what business your family is in. Nor does it matter

Malcolm Gladwell

We knew that our minority students, a lot of them, were doing well," says Richard Lempert, one of the authors of the Michigan study. "I think our expectation was that we would find a half- or two-thirds-full glass, that they had not done as well as the white students but nonetheless a lot were quite successful. But we were completely surprised. We found that they were doing every bit as well. There was no place we saw any serious discrepancy.

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

But testing products or ideas that are truly revolutionary is another matter, and the most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases, the first impressions of their consumers need interpretation.

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. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

I know how to ask for the money.' And that's the secret to the whole damn business.

take control of the machinery of achievement, in other words—not just in sports but, as we

Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

Judgment matters: it is what separates winners from losers.

in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the skilled, the talented, and the driven—I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.