Outliers Malcolm Gladwell Quotes & Sayings

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

I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with. — P. J. O'Rourke

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

I want to be a worshiper with that heart-desperate to be as close to my Savior as possible, and following his every move and step. — Vicky Beeching

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

People don't rise from nothing, — 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

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

There is considerable freedom attached to knowing and accepting who you are. — Carlos Wallace

X-Ray crystallography is nowadays an accurate and rapid method of determining conformation in the crystal lattice, which conformation usually corresponds to the preferred conformation in solution. — Derek Harold Richard Barton

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

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

You are not exposed to one chemical at a time, but a complex mixture of chemicals that changes day by day, hour by hour, depending on where you are and the environment you are in ... In the United States alone it is estimated that over 72,000 different chemicals are used regularly. Two thousand five hundred new chemicals are introduced annually-and of these, only 15 are partially tested for their safety. Not one of the chemicals in use today has been adequately tested for these intergenerational effects that are initiated in the womb. — Theo Colborn