Description
I am looking for someone to write about how Stephen Curry had hidden opportunities and if they had a cultural legacy. Each question is its own separate essay, (300 to 500) words for each one. Prompt and other requirements are pasted below in the attachments.
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Outliers – Final Project 2023
Context and Gladwell’s Core Argument: Gladwell builds a case through examples/data which shows how
success is the result of hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities, and cultural legacies. These factors
may lead to an accumulative advantage(s) that positions individuals/groups for success over those who do
have those same benefits.
Your Task: In the final project of this unit, you will select and research a contemporary individual and
construct a case in support OR that challenges Gladwell’s argument. In other words, you will have to
research the individual’s life including childhood, family, and culture, as well as the social/historical context
to make your determination of whether or not Gladwell’s claims are correct.
The purpose of this assignment is to use best practice research strategies and argumentative reasoning
skills. Just like Gladwell builds a case for his argument through research, so will you. Yes, you will both
evaluate Gladwell’s claims and make an argument for your own.
Requirements:
● You will complete 2 short writings (about 1 page each; ~300 – 500ish words)
○ Support all ideas and claims with evidence from Outliers and also from outside sources (4
minimum)
● You will also complete an Annotated Bibliography
● All your work should be on the same google document which you will submit to both Turnitin.com
and Schoology
Writing #1 – Opportunity
● Did your person have, or benefit from, any hidden advantages or extraordinary opportunities that led
to an accumulated advantage that allowed them to be able to learn and work hard and make sense of
the world in ways that others cannot?
Writing #2 – Cultural Legacy
● Did your person have, or benefit from, cultural legacies that led them to be able to learn and work
hard and make sense of the world in ways that others cannot?
Annotated Works Cited
Each entry in an annotated works cited page consists of a citation and the “annotation“, a short paragraph
that summarizes or evaluates the source. Whether you need to simply describe or critically evaluate or analyze
each source depends on your assignment and/or the purpose of your bibliography.
Annotation summary or evaluation paragraphs should usually be arranged alphabetically, according to the
author’s last name, and need to be in line with the required citation style (more on that below).
●
You will:
○ Complete research and find at least 4 credible sources that will help you to answer the
questions asked by the prompt (i.e. Did Elon Musk have any cultural legacies that gave an
advantage?)
○ For each source, you will:
■ Complete an MLA works cited entry
■
■
RUBRIC
Write a brief entry for each source that summarizes the source and tells how you will
use, or have used, this source to support your claims and ideas
Example Annotated Bibliography and Guidance
Outliers – Project Rubric 2023
Writing
Response to
prompt and
understanding of
Gladwell’s ideas 10 points
10
9
8
7
6
5
Clear claims and
structure – 10
10
9
8
7
6
5
Reasoning and
explanations – 10
10
9
8
7
6
5
Academic
Language – 5
5
4
3
2
1
0
Mechanics,
Grammar – 10
10
9
8
7
6
5
Including quote/
evidence
integration
Annotated Bibliography
Number and
quality of sources
– 10
10
9
8
7
6
5
MLA citation – 5
5
4
3
2
1
0
Annotations – 10
10
9
8
7
6
5
Blackwell 1
Outliers Writing Project – Outline Guidance
Writing #1 – Opportunity
This writing should focus on the ideas from Part One of Outliers. In this short writing, you will
dive into the hidden advantages or extraordinary opportunities that led to your topic’s
immense success, or perhaps that led to what Gladwell calls an accumulated advantage? Does
their life story support or contradict Gladwell’s claims about success?
Note: The number of body paragraphs and the depth of your explanations will vary depending on
the results of your research. If your person/group clearly benefited from two significant
opportunities, then you should have two body paragraphs, if they benefited from three, then you
should have three body paragraphs, etc.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Introduction
A. Hook to build readers’ interest
B. Introduce Outliers, Gladwell, and focus of part one – Opportunity
C. Introduce my person (Elon Musk)
D. Thesis
Body paragraph 1
A. Topic sentence that uses key term from part one (hidden advantage,
extraordinary opportunity)
B. Evidence to support – detail about Musk’s life
C. explanation/commentary
1. Should explain how this detail led to his success or an accumulated
advantage
D. More evidence?
E. More explanation?
F. Concluding/transition sentence
Body paragraphs 2, and maybe 3, or maybe 4 (depending on how many points you need
to make)
A. Follow the pattern for body paragraph 1 (above)
Conclusion
A. restate /summarize main points
B. Explain how this info either supports or contradicts Gladwell’s main claims
C. Address significance – why is this important, why should this matter for your
audience, what should readers think about, feel, or do?
D.
Blackwell 2
Writing #2 – Legacy
This writing should focus on the ideas from Part Two of Outliers. In this short writing, you will
dive into the cultural legacy(ies) that led to your topic’s immense success, or perhaps that led
to what Gladwell calls an accumulated advantage? Does their life story support or contradict
Gladwell’s claims about success?
Note: The number of body paragraphs and the depth of your explanations will vary depending on
the results of your research. If your person/group clearly benefited from two significant factors
related to cultural legacy, then you should have two body paragraphs, if they benefited from
three, then you should have three body paragraphs, etc.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Introduction
A. Hook to build readers’ interest
B. Introduce Outliers, Gladwell, and focus of part two – Cultural Legacies
C. Introduce my person (Elon Musk)
D. Thesis
Body paragraph 1
A. Topic sentence that uses key term from part two (cultural legacy)
B. Evidence to support – detail about Musk’s life
C. explanation/commentary
1. Should explain how this detail led to his success or an accumulated
advantage
D. More evidence?
E. More explanation?
F. Concluding/transition sentence
Body paragraphs 2, and maybe 3, or maybe 4 (depending on how many points you need
to make)
A. Follow the pattern for body paragraph 1 (above)
Conclusion
A. restate /summarize main points
B. Explain how this info either supports or contradicts Gladwell’s main claims
C. Address significance – why is this important, why should this matter for your
audience, what should readers think about, feel, or do?
Blackwell 3
Annotated Works Cited
Bruner, Raisa. “A Timeline of Elon Musk’s Business Endeavors.” Time Magazine. 27 April 2022.
Accessed Online.
Here is where I would write my summary of the entry above. I would summarize the
article’s main points in 3 or 4 sentences, and then I would tell how I have used this source in
my actual writing. The whole annotation should be around 5-7 sentences long.
Gregerson, Erik. “Elon Musk: American Entrepreneur.” Britannica. 10 December 2023.
Accessed Online
Here is where I would write my next summary. I would summarize the article’s main
points in 3 or 4 sentences, and then I would tell how I have used this source in my actual
writing. The whole annotation should be around 5-7 sentences long.
Outliers
THE S T O R Y OF S U C C E S S
MALCOLM
G LAD W E L L
# 1 bestselling author of The
Tipping
Point
and
Blink
$27.99
$ 3 0 . 9 9 in C a n a d a
Why d o s o m e p e o p l e succeed far more than others?
T h e r e is a story that is usually told a b o u t
extremely successful p e o p l e , a story that focuses
o n intelligence a n d ambition. In Outliers
Malcolm
Gladwell a r g u e s that the true story o f s u c c e s s is
very different, a n d that if we want to u n d e r s t a n d
h o w s o m e p e o p l e thrive, we s h o u l d s p e n d m o r e
time l o o k i n g around them — at s u c h things as
their family, their birthplace, or even their birth
d a t e . T h e story o f s u c c e s s is m o r e c o m p l e x — a n d
a lot m o r e interesting — than it initially a p p e a r s .
Outliers
e x p l a i n s w h a t the B e a t l e s a n d Bill
G a t e s have in c o m m o n , the e x t r a o r d i n a r y s u c c e s s
o f A s i a n s at m a t h , the h i d d e n a d v a n t a g e s o f star
athletes, why all t o p N e w York lawyers have the
s a m e r é s u m é , a n d the r e a s o n y o u ‘ v e never h e a r d
o f the w o r l d ‘ s s m a r t e s t m a n — all in terms o f g e n
eration, family, c u l t u r e , a n d c l a s s . It matters w h a t
year y o u were b o r n if y o u want to b e a S i l i c o n
Valley billionaire, G l a d w e l l a r g u e s , a n d it matters
w h e r e y o u w e r e b o r n if y o u want to b e a s u c
cessful p i l o t . T h e lives o f outliers — those p e o p l e
w h o s e a c h i e v e m e n t s fall o u t s i d e n o r m a l e x p e r i
e n c e — follow a p e c u l i a r a n d u n e x p e c t e d l o g i c ,
a n d in m a k i n g that l o g i c p l a i n G l a d w e l l p r e s e n t s a
fascinating a n d provocative b l u e p r i n t for m a k i n g
the m o s t o f h u m a n potential.
(continued on back flap)
In The Tipping
Point M a l c o l m G l a d w e l l
c h a n g e d the w a y we u n d e r s t a n d the w o r l d .
In Blink he c h a n g e d the w a y w e think a b o u t
thinking. Outliers will t r a n s f o r m the w a y w e
understand success.
MALCOLM
G L A D W E L L is the a u t h o r o f the
# 1 international bestsellers The Tipping Point and
Blink. H e is a staff writer for The New Yorker
and was formerly a business and science reporter
at the Washington Post. For m o r e information a b o u t
Malcolm Gladwell, go to www.gladwell.com.
LOOK
FOR
The
==;
T I P P I N G
POINT
•
blink
MALCOLM
GLADWELL
Malcolm Gladwell
A l s o a v a i l a b l e from
V”*””
J a c k e t d e s i g n by A l l i s o n J . Warner
J a c k e t p h o t o g r a p h © Andy C r a w f o r d / D o r l i n g Kindersley/Getty Images
A u t h o r p h o t o g r a p h by B r o o k e W i l l i a m s
V i s i t o u r Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
P r i n t e d in the U . S . A . © 2 0 0 8 H a c h e t t e B o o k G r o u p , I n c .
Two of the most
influential books of the past
decade
THE TIPPING POINT
H o w Little T h i n g s C a n M a k e a Big Difference
“A fascinating b o o k that makes you see the world in a different way.”
— Fortune
“GladwelPs theories could be u s e d to run
businesses more effectively, to turn products into runaway bestsellers,
and perhaps most important, to alter human behavior.”
— New York Times
BLINK
T h e Power o f T h i n k i n g W i t h o u t T h i n k i n g
“A real pleasure
Brims with surprising insights about
our world and ourselves.”
— Salon.com
“Royally entertaining.”
— Time
ISBN
978-0-316-01792-3
OUTLIERS
A L S O BY M A L C O L M
GLADWELL
Blink
The Tipping Point
OUTLIERS
The
Story
of
Success
MALCOLM GLADWELL
L I T T L E , BROWN AND C O M P A N Y
NEW
YORK
•
BOSTON
•
LONDON
C o p y r i g h t © 2008 by Malcolm Gladwell
A l l rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U . S . Copyright Act
of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval
system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Little, B r o w n and Company
Hachette B o o k Group
237 Park Avenue, N e w York, N Y 1 0 0 1 7
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First Edition: November 2008
Little, B r o w n and C o m p a n y is a division of Hachette B o o k Group, Inc.
The Little, B r o w n name and logo are trademarks of
Hachette B o o k Group, Inc.
The author is grateful for permission to use the following copyrighted material:
American
Prometheus,
by K a i Bird and Martin J . Sherwin, copyright 2005
by K a i Bird and Martin J . Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A . Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods:
Class, Race, and
Family Life, by Annette Lareau, copyright 2003 Regents of the University of
California. Published by the University of California Press; “Intercultural
Communication in Cognitive Values: Americans and Koreans, by Ho-min
Sohn, University of Hawaii Press, 1983; The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis
Borgenicht
( N e w York: G . P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942). Used by permission of
L i n d y Friedman Sobel and Alice Friedman Holzman.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gladwell, Malcolm.
Outliers : the story of success / Malcolm Gladwell. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
H C I S B N 978-0-316-01792-3
Int’l ed. I S B N 978-0-316-03669-6
1. Successful people.
2. Success.
I. Title.
BF637.S8G533 2008
302 —dc22
2008032824
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
RRD-IN
B o o k designed by Meryl Levavi
Printed in the United States of America
For
Daisy
Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Roseto
“These people
Mystery
were d y i n g of old
T h a t ‘ s it.”
age.
3
PART ONE: O P P O R T U N I T Y
ONE
The Matthew
“For unto everyone
s h a l l be g i v e n ,
Effect
that
hath
and he s h a l l
abundance. But from him that
have
hath
n o t s h a l l be t a k e n a w a y e v e n t h a t
which
he h a t h . ” — M a t t h e w 2 5 : 2 9
15
CONTENTS
TWO
The 10,000-Hour
Rule
“In H a m b u r g , we had to
for eight hours.”
play
35
THREE
The Trouble with Geniuses,
“Knowledge
little
Part 1
o f a b o y ‘ s I Q is o f
h e l p if y o u a r e f a c e d
a formful
with
of clever boys.”
69
FOUR
The Trouble with Geniuses,
“After protracted
Part 2
negotiations,
it w a s a g r e e d t h a t R o b e r t w o u l d
put on p r o b a t i o n . ”
91
FIVE
The Three Lessons
of J o e
” M a r y got a q u a r t e r . ”
PART TWO:
Flom
1 1 6
LEGACY
six
Harlan,
“Die
Kentucky
like a man, like
b r o t h e r did!”
VIII
your
1 6 1
be
CONTENTS
SEVEN
T h e E t h n i c T h e o r y of Plane
Crashes
” C a p t a i n , the w e a t h e r radar
h e l p e d us a lot.”
has
1 7 7
EIGHT
Rice Paddies and M a t h
“No
one who
Tests
can rise before dawn
hundred s i x t y days a y e a r fails
m a k e his f a m i l y
rich.”
three
to
2 2 4
NINE
Marita’s Bargain
“All m y f r i e n d s
n o w a r e f r o m K I P P.”
EPILOGUE
A Jamaican Story
“If a p r o g e n y of y o u n g
colored
c h i l d r e n is b r o u g h t f o r t h ,
are e m a n c i p a t e d . ”
NOTES
these
270
2 8 7
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
297
3 0 1
IX
2 5 0
OUTLIERS
I N T R O D U C T I O N
The Roseto
“THESE
OF
Mystery
PEOPLE
WERE
OLD AGE. THAT’S
DYING
IT.”
out-li-er – , l ï ( – 9 ) r noun
i: something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in
value from the others of the sample
1.
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of
Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of
Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the
Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once
the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side
leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady
of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely clustered two-story stone houses
with red-tile roofs.
3
OUTLIERS
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the
marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the
fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five
miles down the mountain in the morning and then mak
ing the long journey back up the hill at night. Life was
hard. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately
poor and without much hope for economic betterment
until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth
century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten
men and one boy—set sail for New York. They spent
their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tav
ern 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 Ban
gor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans
left Italy for America, and several members of that group
ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in
the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word
back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and
soon one group of Rosetans after another packed their
bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream
of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve
hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leav
ing entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside
connected to Bangor by a steep, rutted wagon path. They
built closely clustered two-story stone houses with slate
roofs on narrow streets running up and down the hillside.
They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel and named the main street, on which it stood, Gari-
4
THE
ROSETO
MYSTERY
baldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In
the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they
soon changed it to Roseto, which seemed only appropri
ate given that almost all of them had come from the same
village in Italy.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest by the name of Father
Pasquale de Nisco took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized
festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land
and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons, and fruit trees
in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out
seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans
began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes
for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent, and a
cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and res
taurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More
than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the
garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh
and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly
German, which meant—given the fractious relationships
between the English and Germans and Italians in those
years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans. If you
had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Penn
sylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would
have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the
precise southern Foggian dialect spoken back in the Ital
ian Roseto. Roseto, Pennsylvania, was its own tiny, selfsufficient world—all but unknown by the society around
it—and it might well have remained so but for a man
named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the
5
OUTLIERS
stomach and taught in the medical school at the Univer
sity of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in
Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto — although that, of
course, didn’t mean much, since Roseto was so much in
its own world that it was possible to live in the next town
and never know much about it. “One of the times when
we were up there for the summer—this would have been
in the late nineteen fifties — I was invited to give a talk
at the local medical society,” Wolf said years later in an
interview. “After the talk was over, one of the local doc
tors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having
a drink, he said, ‘You know, I’ve been practicing for sev
enteen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find
anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart
disease.’ ”
Wolf was taken aback. This was the 1950s, years before
the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive
measures to prevent heart disease. Heart attacks were an
epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause
of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossi
ble to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart
disease.
Wolf decided to investigate. He enlisted the support
of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma.
They gathered together the death certificates from resi
dents of the town, going back as many years as they could.
They analyzed physicians’ records. They took medical
histories and constructed family genealogies. “We got
busy,” Wolf said. “We decided to do a preliminary study.
We started in nineteen sixty-one. The mayor said, ‘All my
6
THE
ROSETO
MYSTERY
sisters are going to help you/ He had four sisters. He said,
‘You can have the town council room/ I said, ‘Where are
you going to have council meetings?’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll
postpone them for a while/ The ladies would bring us
lunch. We had little booths where we could take blood, do
EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with
the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer.
We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested.”
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no
one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed
any signs of heart disease. For men over sixty-five, the
death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half
that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from
all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower
than expected.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from
Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. “I hired med
ical students and sociology grad students as interview
ers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to
every person aged twenty-one and over,” Bruhn remem
bers. This happened more than fifty years ago, but Bruhn
still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he described
what they found. “There was no suicide, no alcoholism,
no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have
anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They
didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying
of old age. That’s it.”
Wolf’s profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a
place that lay outside everyday experience, where the nor
mal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.
7
OUTLIERS
2.
Wolf’s first thought was that the Rosetans must have held
on to some dietary practices from the Old World that left
them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly real
ized that wasn’t true. The Rosetans were cooking with
lard instead of with the much healthier olive oil they had
used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt,
oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies, or onions.
Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham, and sometimes eggs. Sweets such as
biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and
Easter; in Roseto they were eaten year-round. When Wolf
had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan’s eating habits,
they found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories
came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at
dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily and many were struggling
with obesity.
If diet and exercise didn’t explain the findings, then
what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close-knit group
from the same region of Italy, and Wolf’s next thought was
to wonder whether they were of a particularly hardy stock
that protected them from disease. So he tracked down rela
tives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the
United States to see if they shared the same remarkable
good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn’t.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived.
Was it possible that there was something about living in the
foothills of eastern Pennsylvania that was good for their
health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor,
8
THE
ROSETO
MYSTERY
which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles
away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and
both were populated with the same kind of hardworking
European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns’
medical records. For men over sixty-five, the death rates
from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were three
times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of
Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location. It had
to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around
the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the
Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Ital
ian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their
backyards. They learned about the extended family clans
that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how
many homes had three generations living under one roof,
and how much respect grandparents commanded. They
went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the
unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted
twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just
under two thousand people. They picked up on the partic
ular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discour
aged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped
the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy
to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had cre
ated a powerful, protective social structure capable of
insulating them from the pressures of the modern world.
The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were
/row, because of the world they had created for themselves
in their tiny little town in the hills.
9
OUTLIERS
“I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and
you’d see three-generational family meals, all the baker
ies, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on
their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where
the women worked during the day, while the men worked
in the slate quarries,” Bruhn said. “It was magical.”
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings
to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of
skepticism they faced. They went to conferences where
their peers were presenting long rows of data arrayed in
complex charts and referring to this kind of gene or that
kind of physiological process, and they themselves were
talking instead about the mysterious and magical benefits
of people stopping to talk to one another on the street and
of having three generations under one roof. Living a long
life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended
to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It
depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose
to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effec
tively we were treated by the medical system. No one was
used to thinking about health in terms of community.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical estab
lishment to think about health and heart attacks in an
entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they
wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy
if all they did was think about an individual’s personal
choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond
the individual. They had to understand the culture he or
she was a part of, and who their friends and families were,
and what town their families came from. They had to
I o
THE
ROSETO
MYSTERY
appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit
and the people we surround ourselves with have a pro
found effect on who we are.
In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of
success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of
health.
11
PART
ONE
OPPORTUNITY
C H A P T E R
The
“FOR
BE
BUT
Matthew
UNTO
GIVEN,
EVERYONE
AND
FROM
TAKEN
O N E
EVEN
—
THAT
HE SHALL
HIM THAT
AWAY
Effect
HAVE
HATH
THAT
MATTHEW
HATH
SHALL
ABUNDANCE,
NOT SHALL
WHICH
H E
BE
HATH.”
25:29
1.
t n e
One warm, spring day in May of 2 0 0 7 ,
Medicine Hat
Tigers and the Vancouver Giants met for the Memorial
Cup hockey championships in Vancouver, British Colum
bia. The Tigers and the Giants were the two finest teams in
the Canadian Hockey League, which in turn is the finest
junior hockey league in the world. These were the future
stars of the sport—seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteenyear-olds who had been skating and shooting pucks since
they were barely more than toddlers.
The game was broadcast on Canadian national televi
sion. Up and down the streets of downtown Vancouver,
Memorial Cup banners hung from the lampposts. The
arena was packed. A long red carpet was rolled out on the
ice, and the announcer introduced the game’s dignitar
ies. First came the premier of British Columbia, Gordon
Campbell. Then, amid tumultuous applause, out walked
15
OUTLIERS
Gordie Howe, one of the legends of the game. “Ladies and
gentlemen,” the announcer boomed. “Mr. Hockey!”
For the next sixty minutes, the two teams played spir
ited, aggressive hockey. Vancouver scored first, early in
the second period, on a rebound by Mario Bliznak. Late
in the second period, it was Medicine Hat’s turn, as the
team’s scoring leader, Darren Helm, fired a quick shot past
Vancouver’s goalie, Tyson Sexsmith. Vancouver answered
in the third period, scoring the game’s deciding goal, and
then, when Medicine Hat pulled its goalie in desperation,
Vancouver scored a third time.
In the aftermath of the game, the players and their
families and sports reporters from across the country
crammed into the winning team’s locker room. The air
was filled with cigar smoke and the smell of champagne
and sweat-soaked hockey gear. On the wall was a handpainted banner: “Embrace the Struggle.” In the center
of the room the Giants’ coach, Don Hay, stood mistyeyed. “I’m just so proud of these guys,” he said. “Just look
around the locker room. There isn’t one guy who didn’t
buy in wholeheartedly.”
Canadian hockey is a meritocracy. Thousands of Cana
dian boys begin to play the sport at the “novice” level,
before they are even in kindergarten. From that point on,
there are leagues for every age class, and at each of those
levels, the players are sifted and sorted and evaluated,
with the most talented separated out and groomed for
the next level. By the time players reach their midteens,
the very best of the best have been channeled into an elite
league known as Major Junior A, which is the top of the
pyramid. And if your Major Junior A team plays for the
16
THE
MATTHEW
EFFECT
Memorial Cup, that means you are at the very top of the
top of the pyramid.
This is the way most sports pick their future stars. It’s
the way soccer is organized in Europe and South Amer
ica, and it’s the way Olympic athletes are chosen. For that
matter, it is not all that different from the way the world
of classical music picks its future virtuosos, or the way
the world of ballet picks its future ballerinas, or the way
our elite educational system picks its future scientists and
intellectuals.
You can’t buy your way into Major Junior A hockey. It
doesn’t matter who your father or mother is, or who your
grandfather was, or what business your family is in. Nor
does it matter if you live in the most remote corner of the
most northerly province in Canada. If you have ability,
the vast network of hockey scouts and talent spotters will
find you, and if you are willing to work to develop that
ability, the system will reward you. Success in hockey is
based on individual merit—and both of those words are
important. Players are judged on their own performance,
not on anyone else’s, and on the basis of their ability, not
on some other arbitrary fact.
Or are they?
2.
This is a book about outliers, about men and women who
do things that are out of the ordinary. Over the course of
the chapters ahead, I’m going to introduce you to one kind
of outlier after another: to geniuses, business tycoons, rock
stars, and software programmers. We’re going to uncover
17
OUTLIERS
the secrets of a remarkable lawyer, look at what separates
the very best pilots from pilots who have crashed planes,
and try to figure out why Asians are so good at math. And
in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the
skilled, the talented, and the driven—I will argue that
there is something profoundly wrong with the way we
make sense of success.
What is the question we always ask about the successful?
We want to know what they’re like—what kind of person
alities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of
lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have
been born with. And we assume that it is those personal
qualities that explain how that individual reached the top.
In the autobiographies published every year by the bil
lionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity, the story line is
always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances
and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to
greatness. In the Bible, Joseph is cast out by his brothers
and sold into slavery and then rises to become the pharaoh’s
right-hand man on the strength of his own brilliance and
insight. In the famous nineteenth-century novels of Horatio
Alger, young boys born into poverty rise to riches through
a combination of pluck and initiativ
