• "It is not enough to ask what successful people are like; their ancestry and environment play equally significant roles in their success story"
• "We need to look beyond their nature to their environment to fully understand the factors responsible for the successes they achieve."
• "People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage."
• "The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact, they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot."
• "The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine."
• "Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours"
• "The emerging picture from such studies is that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything"
• "The practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."
• "Bill Joy's way will reveal that talent was not enough, an opportunity was also necessary to make the man."
• "But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert."
• "Geniuses are the purest forms of outliers but the outcome of their lives buttress the fact that talent and hard work are not the only determinants of outstanding success"
• "Intelligence has a threshold."
• "Successful people do not do it alone; they are the products of particular places and environments"
• "Meaningful work combines three things: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward."
• "While it is true that success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages (when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were)."
• "It has been found that where a pilot or copilot comes from determines the kind of communicative skills they possess."
• "Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where we're from, and being a good pilot and coming from a high-power distance culture is a difficult mix."
• "No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."
• "Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for 22 minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds."
• "Doggedness is a cultural trait."