Malcolm Gladwell

Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are *better* off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.

David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others.

For some reason, this is a very difficult lesson for us to learn. We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.

‘Goliath had about as much chance against David,’ the historian Robert Dohrenwend writes, ‘as an Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an [opponent] armed with a .45 automatic pistol.

The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

We have a definition of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right.

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.

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.

Even Mozart—the greatest musical prodigy of all time— couldn’t hit his stride until he had his ten thousand hours in. Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.

He had talent by the truckload. But that’s not the only consideration. It never is.

All the outliers we’ve looked at so far were the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity. Lucky breaks don’t seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and star athletes. They seem like the rule.

He didn’t triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.