the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. - Malcolm Gladwell

Those three things — autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward — are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.

Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable 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 opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

Criminals were people who operated outside social constraint. They were driven by their own dark impulses: mental illness, greed, despair, anger. Weisburd had been taught that the best way to understand why criminals did what they did was to understand who they were. “I call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said. “There are people and they’re like Dracula. They have to commit crime. It’s a model that says that people are so highly motivated to commit crime, nothing else really matters.” Yet if criminals were like Dracula, driven by an insatiable desire to create mayhem, they should have been roaming throughout the 72nd. The kinds of social conditions that Draculas feed on were everywhere. But the Draculas weren’t everywhere. They were only on particular streets.