Daisy is my grandmother. She was a remarkable woman who was responsible for my mother's success-for the fact that my mother was able to get out of the little rural village in Jamaica where she grew up, get a university education in England, and ultimately meet and marry my father. The last chapter of Outliers is an attempt to understand how Daisy was able to make that happen-using all the lessons learned over the course of the book. I've never written something quite this personal before. I hope readers find her story as moving as I did.

Questions and topics for discussion

Malcolm Gladwell argues that there's no such thing as a self-made man and that super achievers are successful because of their circumstances, their families, and their appetite for hard work. How is this view different from the way you have thought about and understood success in the past?

In "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes," Gladwell discusses one extreme way in which different "cultural languages" manifest themselves. In your opinion, what is our "cultural language"? How did it emerge and evolve? Does it work in our favor with regard to our social structure?

Discuss what Gladwell means when he says that biologists often talk about "the 'ecology' of an organism" (here). How is this similar to "accumulative advantage" (here)?

Do you believe that there is such a thing as innate talent? What, according to Gladwell, is the difference among talent, preparation, and opportunity? What link does practice have to success?

Who are the "Termites" and why did they get this nickname? What, in Gladwell's opinion, was Terman's error?

What does Gladwell think are some consequences of the way that we have chosen to think about and personalize success? What opportunities do we miss as a result? Do you think that as a society we should revise our definition of success and how it is achieved?

In your opinion, is the 10,000-hour rule an encouraging or fatalistic lens through which to view the possibility of individual success? How does this rule alter our notion of the American Dream?

Gladwell writes about meritocracies influenced by advantages some people have over others by virtue of opportunities, education, and coaching. As the income gap in the United States continues to widen, do you think that social mobility, which is an essential part of achieving success, will continue to suffer?

Are there any outliers in your life? Who are they and what are their stories? Has reading this book changed what you think of their stories?

Notes

INTRODUCTION

John G. Bruhn and Stewart Wolf have published two books on their work in Roseto: The Roseto Story (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979) and The Power of Clan: The Influence of Human Relationships on Heart Disease (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993). For a comparison of Roseto Valfortore, Italy, and Roseto, Pennsylvania, USA, see Carla Bianco, The Two Rosetos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). Roseto might be unique among small Pennsylvania towns in the degree of academic interest it has attracted.

ONE: THE MATTHEW EFFECT

Jeb Bush's fantasies about being a self-made man are detailed in S. V. Date's Jeb: America's Next Bush (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), esp. pages 8081. Date writes: "In both his 1994 and 1998 runs, Jeb made it clear: not only was he not apologizing for his background, he was proud of where he was financially, and certain that it was the result of his own pluck and work ethic. 'I've worked real hard for what I've achieved and I'm quite proud of it,' he told the St. Petersburg Times in 1993. 'I have no sense of guilt, no sense of wrongdoing.'

"The attitude was much the same as he had expressed on CNN's Larry King Live in 1992: 'I think, overall, it's a disadvantage,' he said of being the president's son when it came to his business opportunities. 'Because you're restricted in what you can do.'

"This thinking cannot be described as anything other than delusional."

The Lethbridge Broncos, who were playing the day that Paula and Roger Barnsley first noticed the relative-age effect, were a junior ice hockey team in the Western Hockey League from 1974 until 1986. They won the WHL Championship in 198283, and three years later were brought back to Swift Current in Saskatchewan. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethbridge_Broncos.

For an overview of the relative-age effect, see Jochen Musch and Simon Grondin, "Unequal Competition as an Impediment to Personal Development: A Review of the Relative Age Effect in Sport," published in Developmental Review 21, no. 2 (2001): 147167.

Roger Barnsley and A. H. Thompson have put their study on a Web site, http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/relage.htm.

Self-fulfilling prophecies can be traced back to ancient Greek and Indian literature, but the term itself was coined by Robert K. Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968).

Barnsley and his team branched out into other sports. See R. Barnsley, A. H. Thompson, and Philipe Legault, "Family Planning: Football Style. The Relative Age Effect in Football," published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport 27, no. 1 (1992): 7788.

The statistics for the relative-age effect in baseball come from Greg Spira, in Slate magazine, http://www.slate.com/id/2188866/.

A. Dudink, at the University of Amsterdam, showed how the cutoff date for English Premier League soccer creates the same age hierarchy as is seen in Canadian hockey. See "Birth Date and Sporting Success," Nature 368 (1994): 592.

Interestingly, in Belgium, the cutoff date for soccer used to be August 1, and back then, almost a quarter of their top players were born in August and September. But then the Belgian soccer federation switched to January 1, and sure enough, within a few years, there were almost no elite soccer players born in December, and an overwhelming number born in January. For more, see Werner F. Helsen, Janet L. Starkes, and Jan van Winckel, "Effects of a Change in Selection Year on Success in Male Soccer Players," American Journal of Human Biology 12, no. 6 (2000): 729735.

Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey's data comes from "The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects," published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 4 (2006): 14371472.

TWO: THE 10,000-HOUR RULE

Much of the discussion of Bill Joy's history comes from Andrew Leonard's Salon article, "BSD Unix: Power to the People, from the Code," May 16, 2000, http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/index.html.

For a history of the University of Michigan Computer Center, see "A Career Interview with Bernie Galler," professor emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the school, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 23, no. 4 (2001): 107112.

One of (many) wonderful articles by Ericsson and his colleagues about the ten-thousand-hour rule is K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363406.

Daniel J. Levitin talks about the ten thousand hours it takes to get mastery in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006), p. 197.

Mozart's development as a prodigy is discussed in Michael J. A. Howe's Genius Explained (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 3.

Harold Schonberg is quoted in John R. Hayes, Thinking and Learning Skills. Vol. 2: Research and Open Questions, ed. Susan F. Chipman, Judith W. Segal, and Robert Glaser (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1985).

For chess's exception to the rule, grandmaster Bobby Fischer, see Neil Charness, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Ulrich Mayr in their essay "The Role of Practice and Coaching in Entrepreneurial Skill Domains: An International Comparison of Life-Span Chess Skill Acquisition," in The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games, ed. K. Anders Ericsson (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), pp. 51126, esp. p. 73.

To read more about the time-sharing revolution, see Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews's Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry-And Made Himself the Richest Man in America (New York: Touchstone, 1994), p. 26.

Philip Norman wrote the Beatles' biography Shout! (New York: Fireside, 2003).

John Lennon and George Harrison's reminiscences about the band's beginning in Hamburg come from Hamburg Days by George Harrison, Astrid Kirchherr, and Klaus Voorman (Surrey: Genesis Publications, 1999). The quotation is from page 122.