Essay On Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Ahmed Makki

SBS Writing

Book Critique

The Author of the novel Outliers A Story Of Success Malcolm Gladwell not only is he an author but also a speaker and a journalist from Canada who worked in the New Yorker . The book that will be discussed here is called Outliers which means that an individual or an object is different from other members of the same category or group . The author’s main thesis statement in the book is that people are successful not only because of their hard work and natural ability but because of unseen advantages and opportunities .

The book Outliers the Story of Success is the Authors third book that made it . This books discuss the social and cultural factors that

make an individual successful . In todays society an individual can measure success as traits they have acquired due to their characteristics such as being smart , very cautious and sacrifices that was done to achieve success . But Gladwell doesn't believe that he believes that successful people are bases on how they were brought up and their conditions that could have helped along the way .

In the first chapter which is called the Matthew effect which means “Who will have more will be given more and has less will be taken less” .

In this chapter the Author Malcolm Gladwell explains his thesis by given an example that shows advantages in sport of players birthdates he showed a correlation between success in hockey and a person birth month . In the book the author uses the Canadian professional hockey league as an examples according to The Canadian Hockey league federation 40% of players are born in the first three months of the years , 30% are born between April and June , 20% between the months of July , September and just 10% in the months of October and December . The explanation that author has for these numbers is that the hockey tryout stop at January 1 so for a child to be born in January will have to wait an entire extra year to tryout than a person being born in December could tryout earlier that one year can affect the players ability a-lot not only will the person have more time to practice but also will be more bigger in body and more grown up than the others .Since this is an advantage to them the author stats that more older the kids is then their abilities are better and they will be sent to better couches and better teams and go through college . The author uses strange correlations that people don,t see because its part of they're hidden advantages they were born in it , it wasn't gained or given it was always there . For example in Chapter 8 of the book the author makes the distinctions that young Chinese children are better in maths than american children . the authors makes this statement by telling us the cause of it is based on a number of factors such as in Madrin its faster to pronounce numbers than in the english language and when counting numbers the Chinese use different system than americans that makes it faster for them add this to cultural aspects of Chinese people that they hard working and they,re stability makes them

hard to fail . the author uses many examples to prove his main thesis but are they reliable .

The author of the book Malcolm Gladwell a graduate from the national journalism center in Washington DC is a writer for the new Yorker since 1996 and written five books in his life with three becoming best sellers . The Author main thesis is that people are not aware of other factors that have lead to success but only hard work and not giving up . The authors bring’s examples that have strange correlations but no true effects but speculation for example in chapter one the person birth month determines the individual ability to be a good player in hockey .the numbers could be true but it doesn't determine the fact the person ability in a game is when they are born but people are different from each other some people might learn faster than others and some people might be more committed than others . The Author comes with the 10,000 hour rule that is amount of time needed before being a true expert at any field as an example he brings Bill Gates and states that he was born luckily in the computer age and due to his family back ground he was given an enormous amount of time to study , practice and understand how computers works . Anyone who wants to become like bill gates will not only work for large amount of time but also but because of the hidden advantages they might not make it you will need to be born in it .

In conclusion I would not agree with the author main statement that is people are successful not only from their hard work but also from their hidden advantages . the reason is that people no matter what family you are born or what time or period anyone can be successful . the real story of success in my opinion is not for people who already are successful and add on to their success but about people who came from nothing and straight in success by hard work and never giving up .