Excerpts from Outliers: How Society, Culture, and Family Environment Shape Growth

Excerpts from Outliers: How Society, Culture, and Family Environment Shape Growth

• A slight advantage from being just a few months older can accumulate throughout a child’s development, eventually setting them on a path toward success or failure, confidence or insecurity. Its effects can last for many years.
• Sternberg’s practical intelligence includes “knowing what to say to whom, when to say it, and how to say it for the best effect.”
• Affluent parents tend to keep their children constantly occupied, shuttling them from one activity to another, and listening to their opinions about teachers, coaches, and teammates. In poor families, children’s lives are not organized around this kind of tight schedule. Their activities are not twice-weekly soccer practices, but playing outside with relatives or the neighbors’ children. Blue-collar parents tend to see children’s activities as separate from the adult world and of little importance.
• Middle-class parents tend to discuss things with their children and reason with them rather than issuing rigid commands. They want their children to talk back, negotiate, and ask questions from an adult’s perspective. If a child performs poorly in school, parents in wealthy families often blame the teacher and stand by the child. By contrast, poor parents are often intimidated by authority and act passively.
• The middle-class parenting style is called “concerted cultivation.” This model tends to “develop children’s talents and skills” and foster initiative. By contrast, the child-rearing strategy in low-income families is “the accomplishment of natural growth.” These parents see their responsibility as simply raising children to adulthood, while viewing the children’s growth and development as the children’s own business.
• When students enter first grade, there are already clear differences in knowledge and ability based on family economic background. Children from affluent families score, on average, 32 points higher than children from poor families. After four years of schooling, the achievement gap between poor and rich children begins to widen dramatically.
• The reading scores of poor children increase by only 0.26. In other words, when school is out, poor children make virtually no progress in reading. Wealthy children, however, see their reading scores rise by 52.49 points over the summer. In fact, most of the gap between children from affluent and poor families is formed during out-of-school time.
• Extraordinary achievement depends less on talent than on opportunity.
• Langan always relied on personal effort, yet no rock star, professional athlete, or software billionaire has ever succeeded through individual effort alone.
• Successful people do not rise on their own. They are always the products of a particular place and environment.
• Autonomy, complexity, and a clear connection between effort and reward—these are the three qualities any truly satisfying job should have. How much money we make is not the ultimate source of happiness; what makes us happy is the extent to which our work allows us to fulfill ourselves.
• In a sense, the possibility of success comes not from ourselves or even from our parents, but from our era—from where we happen to be in history and what opportunities we face. For someone who wants to become a lawyer, the early 1930s were the best years in which to be born, just as 1955 was for software engineers and 1835 was for entrepreneurs.
• Success relies on the accumulation of advantages: when and where you were born, how your parents made a living, and what kind of environment you grew up in all help determine whether you will succeed in society. The traditions and patterns of behavior we inherit from our ancestors also play a decisive role in individual development.
• Cultural inheritance is an even more powerful force behind events. It becomes embedded in human nature and leaves lasting effects. Even after the economic, social, and demographic conditions that produced a culture have disappeared, that culture can remain intact across generations. Culture directly shapes how we see the world and how we behave; its influence is so great that without it, we could not make sense of the world.
• The English number system is highly irregular, unlike Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The number systems in these Asian languages follow a much more logical pattern. This difference in language structure means that Asian children learn to count faster than American children. The average four-year-old Chinese child can count to 40, while an American child of the same age can count only to 15, and most do not reach 40 until age five. In other words, by age five, American children are already a full year behind Asian children in this basic mathematical skill.
• The most striking conclusion from Ericsson’s research is this: first, there is no such thing as an “innate genius” who can achieve more than others while practicing less; second, there is no such thing as someone doomed by “bad luck” who works harder than others but can never become better. The findings suggest that once a musician enters a top conservatory, the only way to stand out is through intense practice. At that stage, the formula for success becomes simple and clear. And top performers do not merely practice harder than others—they practice ten times harder, even a hundred times harder.
• Suddenly, the root of Asians’ advantage in mathematics comes into view. In Asia, school summer vacations are not nearly as long. Why? Because civilizations that value success through hard work do not casually give children three-month summer breaks. American students spend an average of 180 days in school each year, compared with 220 days in South Korea and 243 days in Japan.