The Outlier

The secret of big success

Outliers…

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.

 In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

Source: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html

Outliers… the 10,000 hours for success

In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

 Gladwell contrasts the Chinese proverb ‘No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich’ with the American agricultural practice of letting fields lie fallow in winter, which led to a school year with summer vacations — a practice that works for children of the well-educated but fails children of the less-educated who give up many of their school-year academic gains over the summer.

The rules of social epidemics

The Law of the Few

The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. According to Gladwell, economists call this the “80/20 Principle”, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the ‘work’ will be done by 20 percent of the participants.

 Connectors are people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”

 Mavens are information specialists, these are people who we can rely upon to connect us with new information.

 Salesmen are persuaders, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.

Six degrees of separation

A social psychologist distributed letters to 160 students in Nebraska, with instructions that they be sent to a stockbroker in Boston (not personally known to them) by passing the letters to anyone else that they believed to be socially closer to the target. The study found that it took an average of six links to deliver each letter. Of particular interest to Gladwell was the finding that just three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for half of the letters that arrived successfully.

 This rule states that specific types of people are responsible for bringing about large levels of change.

Source: http://abundance-blog.marelisa-online.com/2008/11/17/outliers-10000-hours-for-success/

The stickiness factor

…is the specific content of a message that renders its impact memorable. Popular children’s television programs such as Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues pioneered the properties of the stickiness factor, thus enhancing the effective retention of the educational content in tandem with its entertainment value.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point /

The power of context

Human behavior is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment. As Gladwell says, “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” Behavior is a product of social context. In an unkempt environment, people are more apt to misbehave than in formal settings.

 Rule of 150: Groups grow too large and loose cohesion at 150 .

Source: http://www.notesofintelligence.com/tipping-point/tipping-point-summary.html

Words to ponder:

Outlier

Phenomena

Below freezing

Very good understanding

A good deal less

One reason or another

Accomplished

Extraordinary

Mastery

Social epidemic

Rare

Social gifts

Economist

Persuaders

Charismatic

Negotiation

Bringing about

Social context

More apt

Unkempt

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