Quotes About Opportunity

But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries—all Goliaths—too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.

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

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

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.

but time and chance happeneth to them all.

In the Big Pond chapter, I talked about the fact that being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests.

They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, eventually finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy

Malcolm Gladwell

far in Outliers, we've seen that extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about

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

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

Malcolm Gladwell

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. "Put people into two categories," Schwartz says. "Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected.

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.

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.

restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor

Malcolm Gladwell

It's a rags-to-riches story, and everything we've learned so far from hockey players and software billionaires and the Termites suggests that success doesn't happen that way. Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one

Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went

our notion that it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much too simplistic.

When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues, this is in large part what we mean. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he's wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because—and perhaps this is even more critical—the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.