Theme Of Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell Essay

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Vivian Gindi As incoming freshmen with high hopes and motivation, we all have one underlying question: how do we tackle college successfully? In the book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell proposes a theory of success after analyzing many success stories. He claims that the ingredients to success include luck, opportunity, hard work and culture. Gladwell proves that although luck is a major factor of success, what can make one successful is taking advantage of the opportunities that present themselves due to the lucky circumstances. Bill Gates had a lucky series of events that lead him to who he was. He was fortunate enough to attend a private school that had a computer club, a remarkable occurrence for that time. Jumping on that chance, Gates was the given the opening to work for the ISI (Information Sciences Inc.). He took …show more content…

Undeniably, Gates put in a tremendous amount of effort to reach success. The next principle that Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes in his book is hard work. Once a person is given the opportunities to become the best, what will distinguish the people who will rise to the top are those who work much harder. Gladwell coins the phrase, “10,000 hours,” as the magic number of time it takes of hard work to reach greatness. Without 10,000 hours of practice, no matter how much luck and opportunity is given, one cannot reach the top level. Musicians, including Mozart, have only reached their potential after practicing for ten thousand hours. As a violinist, this principle is clear; when I practice more, I play better and am able to learn more. The more practice we put in, the better we will be. As a college student, it is important to stay on task and master 10,000 hours of whatever that student strives to be good at. It is important to learn this lesson as freshmen so that we can delve into our studies, practices, games and work and hit our

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