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“To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten years? Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.”
― Outliers: The Story of Success
― Outliers: The Story of Success
“The music critic Harold Schonberg goes further: Mozart, he argues, actually “developed late,” since he didn’t produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than twenty years.”
― Outliers: The Story of Success
― Outliers: The Story of Success
“It was an admission of defeat. ... He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how. He couldn't even talk to his calculus teacher, for goodness' sake. These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one--not even rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses--ever makes it alone.”
― Outliers: The Story of Success
― Outliers: The Story of Success
“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. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.”
― Outliers: The Story of Success
― Outliers: The Story of Success
“I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups--and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand ... you have to go back to the past ... it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact.”
― Outliers: The Story of Success
― Outliers: The Story of Success
Penny’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Penny’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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