Outlier(Part Two -- Legacy)

**Reference: **Part One

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Part Two -- Leagacy

1. Harlan, Kentucky

"DIE LIKE A MAN, LIKE YOUR BROTHER DID!"

1. But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to his reputation -- and that's what a "culture of honor" means.
2. The triumph of a culture honor helps to explain why the pattern of criminality in American South has always been so distinctive. In the backcountry, violence wasn't for economic gain. It was personal. You fought over your honor.
3. Only in a culture of honor would it have occurred to the irascible gentleman that shooting someone was an appropriate response to a person insult.
4. The "culture of honor" hypothesis that 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 your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon close examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.
5. Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
6. So far in Outliers we've seen 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 alll make a significant difference in how well you do in the world. The question for the second part of Outliers is whether the traditions and attitude we inherit from our forbears can play the same role. Can we learn something about why people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously? I think we can.

2. The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes

"CAPTAIN, THE WEATHER RADAR HAS HELPED US A LOT."

1. Historically, crashes have been far more likely happen when the captain is in the "flying seat".
2. Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinary specific.
3. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy.
4. That is an extraordinarily liberating example. When we understand what it really means to be a good pilot -- when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success -- when we don't have to throw up our hands in depair at an airline where pilots crash planes into the sides of moutains. We have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful.

3. Rice Paddies and Math Tests

"NO ONE WHO CAN RISE BEFORE DAWN THREE HUNDRED DAYS A YEAR FAILS TO MAKE HIS FAIMILY RICH."

1. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. When it comes to math, in other words, Asian is a built-in advantage.
2. But the difference between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very dfferent -- that being good at math also be rooted in a group's culture.
3. Historically, Western agriculture is "mechanically" oriented, rice agriculture is "skill oriented".
4. This is not, of course, an unfamiliar observation about Asian culture. Go to any Western college campus and you'll find that Asian students have a reputation for being in the library long after everyone else has left.
5. 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.
6. No one who can rise up before dawn fails to make his famility rich.

4. Marita's Bargain

"ALL MY FRIENDS NOW ARE FROM KIPP."

1. KIPP is, rather, an organization that has succeeded by taking the idea of cultural legacies seriously.
2. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is in session.
3. Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a preditable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given the opportunities -- and have had the strength and presence of minds to seize them.

A Jamaican Story

"IF A PROGENY OF YOUNG COLORED CHILDREN IS BROUGHT FORTH, THESE ARE EMANCIPATED."

It is not easy to be so honest about where we're from. It would be simpler for my mother to portray her success as a straightforward triumph over victimhood, just as it would be simpler to look at Joe Flom and call him the greatest lawyer ever—even though his individual achieve­ments are so impossibly intertwined with his ethnicity, his generation, the particulars of the garment industry, and the peculiar biases of the downtown law firms. Bill Gates could accept the title of genius, and leave it at that. It takes no small degree of humility for him to look back on his life and say, "I was very lucky." And he was. The Mothers' Club of Lakeside Academy bought him a computer in 1968. It is impossible for a hockey player, or Bill Joy, or Robert Oppenheimer, or any other outlier for that matter, to look down from their lofty perch and say with truthfulness, "I did this, all by myself." Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky—but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

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create time: 2016-11-23