This book is a touchstone many other books reference. I’m not sure it deserves to be. The thing its famous for is really just in one chapter.
People who are successful in an endeavor, even those only marginally more successful than their peers, are often given the opportunity to practice that endeavor. This additional practice over their slightly less successful peers tends to widen the gap between their levels of success. Because you’re a 6 out of a 10, you are given opportunities (traveling sports teams pick you up) to develop into a 7, 8, 9, or 10. This phenomenon is what Malcolm Gladwell attributes a certain distribution curve of birth months in professional sports.
In Hockey where your birth year determines what leagues you play in, there’s a large disproportionality skewed towards January, February, & March birthdays. More than double the number of players born in the first quarter of the year than those born in the last quarter of the year. The theory is that at young ages, when a matter of less than a year can actually make a difference in the size and skill levels of players this makes the January boys stand out from the December boys on average. The January birthday kids then get selected for special teams in special leagues getting more opportunities to practice because they’re bigger than the younger players. Then, because they’re playing more, they actually get better than those boys who happened to be born later in the year.
This is the most famous claim from this book. Malcolm Gladwell uses Bill Gates and the Beatles to support his claim that “about 10,000 hours” are required to develop a skill such that you’ll truly become an outlier in that field. The Beatles played 7+ straight hour shows 200+ nights a year for multiple years. This forced them to grow and develop beyond just playing their ‘best songs’. Bill Gates spent his childhood taking advantage of an opportunity to code on a computer for free. Over the course of their early careers they all logged 10,000 hours.
10,000 hours is about 3 hours a day every day for 10 years. Or 5 years of 40 hours/week.
Successful people are not typically pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in a vacuum. It requires a community of support (family, friends, peers, and mentors) in the vast majority of cases. Being a genius is not good enough predictor of success.
Once you’re smart ‘enough’, there isn’t really a good correlation to additional IQ points and marks of achievement in your field. You have to meet a certain threshold of intelligence to even get started with a career or a course of study, but after you’ve met that threshold, you’re essentially equally likely as anyone else to achieve greatness. For example, the IQ curve of Nobel prize winners is certainly higher than the general population, but it’s not all-that right-skewed.
Great success stories are usually more about being in the right place at the right time than they are about forcing triumph. It's not enough to just work hard, but also you have to be lucky enough for your hard work to coincide with a societal and temporal situation that favors you're hard work.
The entire second half of the book Outliers can be summarized as what you look like, what language you speak, what your parents did for a living, what their parents did for a living, and what the societal norms are from wherever you’re from do affect your ability to succeed at certain tasks or in certain situations. The most vivid example was the example of the copilot from Korea who wasn’t comfortable speaking up to authority figures and thus allowed his plane to crash due to his lack of clear communication. This and stories like this are the entire second half of this book. I can’t stress that enough. The book isn’t that great.