“A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work,” a quote by Colin Powell. When someone wants something big in life, they do their best to go and get it. It is not by sitting down and fantasizing about it, but actually going out into the world and putting it into action. People look at others’ achievements, telling themselves that those people are successful because they were determined to do it. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story Of Success, he investigates how people become successful. He suggests that a person’s success is through key factors such as intelligence, opportunity, hard work or culture. Gladwell introduces several people who have gone through life successfully and examines the opportunities that helped them achieve the highest spot. What really makes a person an outlier? The most important factor for a person to be defined as an outlier is individual hard work in trying to achieve an accomplishment.
Hard work is the most important factor in creating an outlier. A true outlier is a person who is determined to get his or her work done. Gladwell reveals the work rule of ten-thousand hours. The Beatles and Bill Gates are a few examples of how this rule worked. The Beatles worked “…harder [each night], putt[ing their] heart and soul into it…” to please the audience (Gladwell 49). Playing their gigs in one year, when added together was 270 nights of performing. They mastered different songs to make people want to listen to them, so “…when they came back, they sounded like no one else” (Gladwell 50). Thus, the Beatles were a successful group of boys. Bill Gates on the other hand, worked on a computer to figure out new programming software. As Gladwell states, “…Gat...
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... should care about outliers. They are the ones whose achievements create opportunities for other people. The society may not have these chances, if not for them. As a society, people should encourage others to do their best and work hard to accomplish their goals. They should study and gain intellect on the world around them. Society should provide more opportunities to kids today that will help them become an outlier. When they see a potential outlier they can create special programs to influence them to use their talent. They should encourage kids to try their best, to strive to succeed and not to give up on the first trial. Parents can set up special awards for kids who try hard like going to an amusement park or eating at their favorite restaurant as an incentive to work hard. Working hard with the right incentive will create successful, high achieving outliers.
Outlier. An outlier is someone who is not considered to be a normal person within society. They have qualities that most people do not obtain. They are the most successful of individuals and many aspire to be them. Michael Jackson is the epitome of what I believe is a true outlier. In his best-selling novel, Malcolm Gladwell stated that we tend to spend more time looking at individuals success rather than looking at things that ultimately contributed to that success, such as their family, birthplace, and even birth date.
Throughout the book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell focuses on using the rhetorical technique of pathos to aid his readers in understanding the formula for success. In one particular part of the book, Gladwell uses experiences and human problems as examples to support his idea that plane crashes and ethnicty are related and the greater idea that success is based on opportunity.
Malcolm Gladwell, in the nonfiction book Outliers, claims that success stems from where you come from, and to find that you must look beyond the individual. Malcolm Gladwell develops and supports his claim by defining an outlier, then providing an example of how Stewart Wolf looked beyond the individual, and finally by giving the purpose of the book Outliers as a whole. Gladwell’s purpose is to explain the extenuating circumstances that allowed one group of people to become outliers in order to inform readers on how to be successful. The author writes in a serious and factual tone for the average person in society of both genders and all ethnicities who wants to become successful in life.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that there is no such thing as a self-made man, and that success is only the result of a person’s circumstances. However, throughout the novel Gladwell points out that your circumstances and opportunities only help you become successful if you are willing to take advantage of them and work hard. From a twelve year old living in the Bronx, to those who were born at just the right time to become millionaires, one thing is the same throughout; these people because successful because they seized the opportunities they were given. The advantages and opportunities that came from their circumstances would not be important if they had not grasped them. Every successful man is self made, because he has seized the
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell expresses his theory of success through the 10,000 hour rule that is used to associate practice with success and achieving certain goals. He strives to influence the audience of his point of view and assumptions of successful people throughout the history of the world. Gladwell relates to various historical figures and people of well known talent and intelligence. As the author, Malcolm Gladwell believes to be very knowledgeable, influential throughout the novel. Although he provides interesting facts and statistics to his piece, Gladwell is unable to establish credibility to this information. During college and high school, he did not attain high grades that altered his decision to engage in advertising. After being rejected numerous times, he was later accepted to a journalism position. His insufficient experience and skills contributes to his low credibility and reliability. Gladwell aims to persuade or influence the audience of the importance of practice to fulfill success by also trying to teach the reader new skills. He reaches out to society to capture his inspiring discoveries including young adults in particular who are aspiring to grasp their desired dreams. He introduces the 10,000 hour rule as a goal to reach around the age of twenty or higher. Gladwell compares the lives of professional hockey players, Bill Gates, the Beatles, and Mozart to display their achievements in their later lives due to the amount of experience and practice they were able to endure. He claims that with exactly 10,000 hours of practice, expert level will be sustained in any given skill. Although Gladwell expresses his knowledge and theories of success through devices that exemplify logos and repetition of the 10,00...
I am not convinced that because one is born at the beginning of the year that one is going to be more successful than one who is not. I can be convinced more easily that one’s environment has undue influence on one’s home life but not one’s birth date. There are multiple factors that allow for success that include study, training, encouragement, rest, etc. However, in the context of Gladwell’s book Outliers and the points he made, I believe Outliers is good science because he seems to be challenging that Outliers are not so uniquely
There are many different definitions of success, and many depend on the person defining it. Success can be achieving your goal of running a mile or not failing a math test. It can be independence or not embarrassing yourself in public. To achieve these versions of success, you need to practice and put in effort. After all, Gladwell says if you work hard enough you can do anything and “Achievement is talent plus preparation.” (Gladwell 221). The above definitions of success are similar to my own. I define success as reaching my goals, not being in debt (money wise), and having independence. I also agree with Gladwell that wealth, power, and fame are indicators of success, however, I do not gauge my own success on power or fame. My definition of success has not changed because of the Outliers, but it has changed over time. As I age, my view of the world changes and so does my definition of success.
The ideas presented in Outliers are surprisingly aligned with my own. It makes sense to me that a person’s success isn’t all about ability and his or her individual merit. In the past I have reflected upon my successes to find that I was not alone while achieving them. I have been given tremendous opportunities in life. I have always challenged my own definitions, and I like the spin Malcolm Gladwell puts on his.
For generations, only certain people have achieved success - they are known as geniuses or outliers; however, they did not obtain it on high IQs and innate talents alone. In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell, #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, reveals the transparent secret of success behind every genius that made it big. Intertwined with that, Gladwell builds a convincing implication that the story behind the success of all geniuses is that they were born at the right place, at the right time and took advantage of it. To convey the importance of the outlier’s fortunate circumstances to his readers, he expresses a respective, colloquial tone when examining their lives. Gladwell begins his examination of an outlier’s
The popular saying “practice makes perfect” has been used for many years encouraging younger generations to strive for success in whatever area they wish to excel in. Success is something everybody in society strides for but some do not know how it is achieved. However, there are many people throughout history who are known for achieving success in many areas. Malcolm Gladwell, a best selling author and speaker, identifies these people as being outliers. Gladwell identifies the word “outlier” in his story Outliers as “a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.” Although Malcolm Gladwell does not establish credibility for himself in his novel, his targeted audience of a younger inexperienced generation feel the need to be informed by his detailed theories about becoming successful and eventually becoming an outlier. Although the reality of becoming successful can depend on instances one can not control, Gladwell tells his readers there is a great portion they can control through his theory, the 10,000 hour rule. He does this by using well presented logical persuasive appeals and interesting rhetorical devices such as: onomatopeias, exposition, and argumentation.
In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell calculates success. Through the repeated praxis of shattering the reader’s idea that masters in a particular field achieve their success through individual talent he unravels how their given circumstances was what truly led them to what they became. Example after example he proves how conditions as simple as the year they were born led to their later achievement; the author even demonstrated how a person’s culture can later affect their job performance. CoCo Chanel, arguably the most famed and inspirational fashion
In the book “Outliers: The Story of Success” authored by Malcolm Gladwell, he explains what an outlier is and what it means to be “successful”. Throughout the novel, Gladwell provides examples by writing different stories in nine various chapters to support his claim. Gladwell believes that success isn’t gained by natural talent, but by the effects of other circumstances and that these people are called outliers. It’s the argument of nature vs. nurture that Gladwell wants to address in his book. Many people in society would think that a particular person is successful due to the individual’s natural talents, although that can be true to a certain extent, Gladwell wants to disapprove that idea in people’s mind and wants the public to look at
Malcolm Gladwell’s overall purpose of Outliers: The Story of Success is that success is largely determined by an individual’s socioeconomic and sociocultural environment, and individual ambition, effort, or talent, are less significant, contrary to the societal notions associated with success. In other words, success is not something that someone randomly gained; success is earned through opportunities that develop dedication, interest, and skill over time. By doing this, will one become an outlier, or “something that is situated away or classed differently from a main or related body,” (Gladwell 3) that distinguishes great from good and best from great, as exemplified by “The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that the and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals”, musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.” (Gladwell 39) Gladwell also acknowledges societal norms such that “All of the fourteen men and woman on the list above had vision and talent,” (Gladwell 62-63) to assert hard work, ability, et cetera can lead to success, but a social environment that offers such opportunities immensely increases the likelihood of success.
Some people that are excellent examples of this include Bill Joy, Bills Gates, and The Beatles. All of these people were successful because of their hard work and dedication to what they do. How much dedication does it take? Gladwell states that to become an expert one must spend at least ten thousand hours on the skill. Prior to this milestone, these three were all nothing, no one knew who they were. Starting out I’ll discuss Bill Joy, a computer scientist who made vast improvements to the way we use technology today. Joy went to the University of Michigan looking to become a mathematician or a biologist, but he came out an expert in computer science. The world of programming was still a very new field at this time, so one would think that Joy succeeded due to his dedication and raw talents alone right? Gladwell disagrees, Joy just so happened to have gone to a school where instead of coding with punch cards students were using time-sharing, a much more efficient way to code. Joy was just so fortunate to go to one of the few schools in the entire nation that was using this method of coding. After Michigan, Joy moved on to the University of California Berkley whereby his second year he hit his ten thousand hour milestone. Prior to hitting this milestone, Joy wasn’t widely known in the coding world, but that would all change. Joy would go on to rewrite UNIX and Java, two
If people work hard, focus, and are disciplined, they will succeed in the future. This has become a universal idea taught by parents, teachers, and peers. People have passed down this idea to the younger generations and they chose to live by this moral that makes sense. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell debunks the universal idea that working hard will allow people to play hard and get further in life. Gladwell eliminates the traditional ideas of success by showing that opportunities, family background, and being born at the “right” time are actually what lead to success.