Quotes & Sayings About Outliers

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

When you delight the weird, the overlooked and the outliers, they are significantly more likely to talk about you and recommend you. — Seth

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? — Malcolm Gladwell

Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers. — James S.A. Corey

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. — Malcolm Gladwell

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. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all. — Jonathan Haidt

Once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity. — V.S. Ramachandran

But know this: as far as a music culture goes, EDM is the one who will accept the kids on the outliers, the ones who get bullied, the ones who feel like they may not quite fit in. This community is exceptional in its ability to bond all types together, and I am not exaggerating when I say it saves lives. Our audience is intelligent and kind, discriminating only in regards to which sound they like best. Our audience is unprecedented in their drive to proactively support each other. — Kaskade

The truly creative people tend to be outliers. — Nolan Bushnell

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. — Shereen El Feki

the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn't a problem of outliers. It is pervasive. We've seen the same patterns repeated on three different sites, with different users and different experiences: men, women, free, subscription-only, casual, serious, "urban" demographics, and more "mainstream." All told, the research set represents a large chunk of the young adults in this country, and the data uniformly shows non-blacks discount African American profiles. It's not a problem caused by a small cluster of "ugly" black users or by a small group of unreformed racists throwing off an otherwise regular pattern. — Christian Rudder

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. — David Ignatius

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

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

Confusion over how a person's extraordinary skill is developed runs deep. The heated debate over writer Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hour rule," as put forth i his popular book Outliers: The Story of Success, indicates that it is not just refeerees who get tongue-tied trying to pinpoint the fundaments of their expertise. Proficiency in activities from musicianship to athletics, Gladwell contends, can be achieved only through vast amount of practice (10,000 hours was the ballpark figure he cited, applying it to the triumphs of Bill Gates and the Beatles, among others.) — Bob Katz

All statistics have outliers. — Nenia Campbell

By the end of the meeting, one conscientious human being had cleared up the confusion generated by web-crawling data-gathering programs. The housing authority knew which Catherine Taylor it was dealing with. The question we're left with is this: How many Wanda Taylors are out there clearing up false identities and other errors in our data? The answer: not nearly enough. Humans in the data economy are outliers and throwbacks. — Cathy O'Neil

We have to imagine something before we can build the infrastructure that will allow it to exist. We have failed here on both fronts: in imagination and in reality. Our great weirdos, from Emily Dickinson to Simone Weil to Coco Chanel, are seen as outliers, as not relevant to the way we think through what we want out of life. It's the same way we discuss radical feminist writers like Dworkin and Firestone. Dworkin is unhinged, Firestone is too eccentric to be taken seriously. — Jessa Crispin

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. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem. — Aaron Levie

The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances. — Malcolm Gladwell

If there is one thing I learned by reading Epstein's "The Sports Gene" it is that world-class athletes are, by definition, abnormal: that is, the kind of person capable of competing at that level is necessarily very different from the rest of us physiologically. They are outliers. — Malcolm Gladwell

People don't rise from nothing, — Malcolm Gladwell

when you read findings like the one above, and see that Jamal doesn't get the job, it's easy to shake your head at the few racist hiring managers who've tilted the odds against him. But the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn't a problem of outliers. It is pervasive. — Christian Rudder

I highly recommend Marci Alboher's One Person/ Multiple Careers. It includes lots of practical strategies for living the slash. Malcom Gladwell is also a constant source of inspiration for me. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposes that there are three criteria for meaningful work - complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward - and that these can often be found in creative work.2 These criteria absolutely fit with what cultivating meaningful work means in the context of the Wholehearted journey. Last, I think everyone should read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist3 - I try to read it at least once a year. It's a powerful way of seeing the connections between our gifts, our spirituality, and our work (slashed or not) and how they come together to create meaning in our lives. — Brene Brown