40 Fun Facts About Outliers: the Story of Success

Canadian youth hockey sorts players by calendar year, so Outliers finds the elite are mostly born in which months?

January to March babies are the oldest in each age group, so they look like better athletes early, get picked for elite squads and receive the extra coaching that turns a small head start into a real one.

Outliers made famous a rule, built on studies of expert musicians, that mastery takes about how many hours of practice?

10,000 hours works out to roughly 20 hours a week for ten years, and Gladwell reckons he reached the mark himself during his first decade as a working journalist.

Outliers credits the Beatles' sound to marathon club sets played seven nights a week from 1960 in which German city?

Hamburg gave the band, then a five-piece with Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, its club apprenticeship, and Gladwell argues that the sheer amount of stage time is what set the group apart.

Outliers begins in Roseto, a close-knit Pennsylvania town where 1960s doctors found strikingly little of which illness?

Heart disease was reported in Roseto at about half the national rate, and the researchers who studied the town credited the strong social bonds among its residents.

Which airline's 1997 crash on a hillside in Guam anchors the Outliers chapter about culture and cockpit communication?

Korean Air lost 229 of the 254 people aboard Flight 801, and Gladwell argues that deference to the captain kept the junior crew from voicing their alarm plainly.

Outliers links one region's strength in mathematics to the long hours and discipline demanded by farming which crop?

Rice paddies demand far more hours and precision than Western wheat fields, and Gladwell argues that the work ethic they bred over centuries carried into the classroom.

Outliers says which physicist escaped expulsion after trying to poison his Cambridge tutor?

Robert Oppenheimer left a poisoned apple on his tutor's desk, by one friend's account, yet was allowed to stay, and Gladwell credits the social polish of a wealthy Manhattan childhood.

Outliers cites sociologist Karl Alexander to argue that poorer pupils fall behind mostly during which part of the year?

Summer vacation is when the gap opens: Alexander's five-year study found disadvantaged children progressed as fast as their richer classmates, or faster, while school was in session.

Outliers sets a reported IQ of 195 for a Missouri horse rancher against a claimed 150 for which famous scientist?

Albert Einstein is the book's yardstick for brilliance, and the comparison makes its point: the rancher's far higher score never brought him a career to match.

Which former bouncer, who won $250,000 on the game show 1 vs. 100, does Outliers present as a brilliant mind wasted?

Christopher Langan lost his college scholarship when a financial form went unsent, and Gladwell argues that a childhood of poverty left him without the savvy to talk his way back in.

The epilogue of Outliers turns to Malcolm Gladwell's own family and his mother Joyce's roots on which Caribbean island?

Jamaica is where Joyce grew up before winning a university place in London, where she met Graham Gladwell, a young mathematician; the couple later moved to Canada.

Outliers notes that many top New York lawyers were sons of Jewish immigrants who worked in which business?

Garment making is one strand of a shared biography Gladwell noticed: the same lawyers were born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the 1930s, children of the Depression.

Outliers ties the violent family feuds of Appalachia to Scottish forebears who made their living doing what?

Herding livestock leaves a family's wealth open to rustlers, so herders had to stay vigilant and meet any threat with force, a habit that settled crop farmers never needed.

Outliers names its effect of snowballing early advantage after a verse in which book of the New Testament?

Matthew supplies the verse about those who already have being given more, and two sociologists borrowed it in 1968 for the way eminent scientists collect extra credit.

What does Outliers single out as the reason pupils in the KIPP charter network outscore other inner-city students?

Longer school hours are the whole trick in Gladwell's telling: the network, founded in 1994 by two Teach For America alumni, keeps pupils in class well beyond the usual day and year.

Which 2000 debut by Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell argues that ideas and trends spread the way epidemics do?

The Tipping Point grew out of Gladwell's fascination with the sudden drop in New York City's crime rate, and it began life as a magazine article.

Which magazine hired Malcolm Gladwell as a staff writer in 1996, twelve years before he published Outliers?

The New Yorker took him on after nine years covering business and science for a daily newspaper, and his first bestseller started out as an article in its pages.

Which musician, having read Outliers, agreed there was a lot of truth in it but said long practice guarantees nothing?

Paul McCartney pointed out in a 2010 interview that plenty of other bands had worked the same club circuit just as hard and never made it.

Outliers is divided into two parts: the first is titled Opportunity, and which single word names the second?

Legacy holds four chapters on the cultural inheritances people carry, from Appalachian feuds to airline cockpits; the first part spends five chapters on lucky breaks.

Which Geert Hofstede measure, drawn from surveys of IBM staff worldwide, does Outliers use to compare cockpit cultures?

Power distance runs high in cultures where juniors defer to elders and superiors, and Gladwell argues that modern airliners are designed to be flown by two equals who speak up freely.

Which linguistic term did Outliers popularize for softening a message, as a wary co-pilot might when warning a captain?

Mitigated speech comes in six grades in the book, running from a blunt command at one end to a mere hint at the other.

What brought down Avianca Flight 052 near New York, a 1990 disaster Outliers links to a cockpit culture gap?

It ran out of fuel after three holding patterns and a failed landing attempt, and controllers never grasped the danger because the crew did not use the word emergency.

Which Stanford psychologist's long study of high-IQ children does Outliers use to show brilliance guarantees little?

Lewis Terman, who also revised the Stanford-Binet IQ test, followed about 1,500 gifted children from the 1920s on; a few became eminent, but most went into ordinary jobs.

Which Annette Lareau term for parents actively nurturing a child's talents does Outliers borrow in its fourth chapter?

Concerted cultivation means filling a child's days with organized activities and teaching them to speak to adults as equals, a style Lareau found mostly in middle-class homes.

Which kind of savvy, drawn from psychologist Robert Sternberg's work, does Outliers set against a sky-high IQ score?

Practical intelligence, often called street smarts, is the knack of applying what you know to everyday situations, and it is one of three strands in Sternberg's triarchic theory.

Which podcast did Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell launch in 2016?

Revisionist History starts each episode from a person, event or idea, and it comes from Pushkin Industries, the audio company Gladwell co-founded.

Outliers is dedicated to Daisy, credited with getting Malcolm Gladwell's mother to university; who was she to him?

His grandmother gets the last chapter of the book, which applies its lessons to how she pushed her daughter out of a small rural village and toward an education overseas.

Which musicians did psychologist Anders Ericsson study in the 1993 paper behind the famous practice rule in Outliers?

Violinists were his subjects, and Ericsson later wrote that the rule gets his work wrong: the famous figure was only an average reached by age 20, by players still far from mastery.

The title of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers borrows a technical term from which field?

Statistics uses the word for an observation that sits far from all the others, and Gladwell's own example is a freezing day in the middle of a Paris August.

Which Harvard psychologist accused Outliers, in a New York Times review, of relying on cherry-picked anecdotes?

Steven Pinker also seized on a slip in which Gladwell rendered the mathematical term eigenvalue as Igon Value, to him the mark of a writer who learns a field only by interviewing its experts.

Which takeover lawyer, who built Skadden, Arps into a giant, gets a full Outliers chapter devoted to his three lessons?

Joseph Flom got into Harvard Law School without a college degree, then took up merger and takeover work at a time when most New York law firms would not touch it.

One Outliers chapter on Appalachian family feuds takes its title from the mountain town of Harlan in which state?

Kentucky's Harlan County became notorious again in the 1930s, when violent clashes between coal operators and striking miners were dubbed the Harlan County War.

Which 2016 book did psychologist Anders Ericsson co-write partly to correct the practice rule that Outliers made famous?

Peak argues that what counts is deliberate practice, focused work beyond one's comfort zone, and Ericsson ran an excerpt under a headline saying Gladwell had got his research wrong.

Which practice of delaying a child's start in kindergarten did 60 Minutes trace in 2012 to a section of Outliers?

Redshirting means holding back a five-year-old who is old enough to enrol, in the hope that an extra year of growth turns into a lasting classroom edge.

Outliers says East Asian children gain an early edge in class because their languages have a more logical set of what?

Number words in Chinese follow a regular pattern, so that eleven is simply ten-one, and Gladwell argues this makes counting and mental sums quicker to learn.

At which newspaper did Malcolm Gladwell spend nine years, a stint he counts toward his own decade of practice?

The Washington Post hired him in 1987 to cover business and science, and he has said he arrived a basket case and left feeling like an expert.

The founders of Roseto, the Pennsylvania town that opens Outliers, came from a same-named village in which country?

Italy's Roseto Valfortore, a mountain town in Apulia, sent its first emigrants in 1882 to work the local slate quarries, and the name means rose garden.

Which word completes the title of the Outliers chapter about a brilliant quiz-show winner: The Trouble with what?

Geniuses, in Gladwell's telling, need more than brains: he called his time with the chapter's central figure both intimidating and painfully sad.

Whose Bargain names the ninth chapter of Outliers, the last one before the book's epilogue?

Marita is a pupil in the KIPP charter network, and her chapter closes the half of the book about the cultural inheritances that people carry.

Which 2009 collection of Malcolm Gladwell's magazine articles was the next book he released after Outliers?

What the Dog Saw was his fourth book, and it gathers favourite pieces written for the magazine where he had been a staff writer since 1996.