Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
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.
Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.
Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up.
But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.
Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”