Outliers: Introduction–Chapter 2

by Malcolm Gladwell
Nonfiction writer Malcolm Gladwell theorizes about the surprising circumstances that create exceptional, successful people.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Introduction–Chapter 2, Chapters 3–5, Chapters 6–7, Chapter 8–Epilogue

Here are links to our lists for other works by Malcolm Gladwell: Blink, The Tipping Point
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. compatriot
    a person from your own country
    The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry.
  2. fractious
    easily irritated or annoyed
    Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant — given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians in those years — that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans.
  3. egalitarian
    favoring social equality
    They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
  4. skepticism
    doubt about the truth of something
    When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced.
  5. aftermath
    the outcome of an event
    In the aftermath of the game, the players and their families and sports reporters from across the country crammed into the winning team’s locker room.
  6. elite
    selected as the best
    By the time players reach their midteens, the very best of the best have been channeled into an elite league known as Major Junior A, which is the top of the pyramid.
  7. virtuoso
    a musician who is a consummate master of artistry
    For that matter, it is not all that different from the way the world of classical music picks its future virtuosos, or the way the world of ballet picks its future ballerinas, or the way our elite educational system picks its future scientists and intellectuals.
  8. tycoon
    a very wealthy or powerful businessperson
    Over the course of the chapters ahead, I’m going to introduce you to one kind of outlier after another: to geniuses, business tycoons, rock stars, and software programmers.
  9. initiative
    readiness to embark on bold new ventures
    In the famous nineteenth-century novels of Horatio Alger, young boys born into poverty rise to riches through a combination of pluck and initiative.
  10. beneficiary
    the recipient of funds or other advantages
    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.
  11. forebear
    a person from whom you are descended
    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.
  12. specious
    plausible but false
    As Merton puts it: “This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.”
  13. algorithm
    a precise rule specifying how to solve some problem
    During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that, as one of his many admirers has written, “so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders.’”
  14. collaboration
    act of working jointly
    Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting UNIX, which was a software system developed by AT&T for mainframe computers.
  15. cohort
    a company of companions or supporters
    In one seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe, which averages out to eight hours a day, seven days a week.
Created on Tue May 20 20:28:42 EDT 2014 (updated Wed Jul 02 17:55:34 EDT 2025)

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