Outliers: The Story of Success - by MALCOLM GLADWELL
很多时候我们都把成功归功于个人的因素，某人很有天赋，很聪明，很努力，但事实上，这个人所在的家庭、社区、年代以及他所成长的地方文化等，这些都是成功的重要因素，此所谓“时势造英雄”。
印象深刻的是坠机一章。为什么坠机的飞机，副机长都是韩国人？
作者很会讲故事，推荐大家阅读。
What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we’ve been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that’s the problem, because in order to understand outliers I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We’ve been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.
What’s the most surprising pattern you uncovered in the book? It’s probably the chapter near the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from—that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it’s something that I would never have dreamed was true in a million years.
But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.
These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society.
But there’s a catch. The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage.*
practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.”
IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability.* But social savvy is knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned.
Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style “concerted cultivation.” It’s an attempt to actively “foster and assess a child’s talents,opinions and skills.” Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of“accomplishment of natural growth.” They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own. （为什么中产阶级家出来的孩子成为了之后的佼佼者？）
What did the Cs lack, though? Not something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world. The Cs were squandered talent.
For twenty years he perfected his craft at Skadden, Arps. Then the world changed and he was ready. He didn’t triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity. “It’s not that those guys were smarter lawyers than anyone else,” Rifkind says. “It’s that they had a skill that they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable.”*
The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time,just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.
Not so the Jews. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill.
It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth everyday for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.
If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can’t farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself.
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact,even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.*
Hofstede argued, for example, that cultures can be usefully distinguished according to how much they expect individuals to look after themselves. He called that measurement the “individualism-collectivism scale.”
Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation”—that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. In the engineer’s mind, he has said a lot.
The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven isten-one.
Some estimates put the annual workload of a wet-rice farmer in Asia at three thousand hours a year.
“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”