Outliers Gladwell Summary

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Outliers: The Story of Success Summary
In the book Outliers: The Story of Success Malcom Gladwell defines an outlier as something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body and as a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample. Gladwell introduces the readers to the idea of outliers using Roseto Valfortore, a town one hundred miles south east of Rome. Gladwell considers Roseto an outlier because people there were simply just dying of old age, nothing else. Gladwell says “…Roseto--- a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply”(Gladwell 7).
Gladwell introduces the theory that in order to reach true expertise a person must have practiced 10,000 hours. He uses Mozart, Bill Joy, and even the Beatles as examples of this. Usually it takes about 10 years of dedication to reach 10,000 hours. Gladwell then uses the Beatles to prove this theory, “… their arguably greatest artistic achievement --- Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles [White Album] --- is ten years.)…”(Gladwell 48). The Beatles got well over 10,000 hours in from performing live in places like Hamburg for 8 hours straight and 7 days a week.
Gladwell explains to the readers that a person can have advantages by their …show more content…

There is an idea that the people in Asia children grow to like math because of the transparency of the Asian system. Gladwell says “Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she had to convert the words to numbers (37+ 22)”(Gladwell 229) but an Asian child ask “to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there…”(Gladwell 229). This can prove that Asian children are not innately talented at math. The success at math is due to something as fundamental as

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