When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as… - Malcolm Gladwell

there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success. What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they’re like — what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top.

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called — appropriately enough — the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.