Essay On Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

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Book Review According to The New Yorker, “Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996… He is the author of three New York Times best-sellers: “The Tipping Point,” “Blink,” and Outliers” (Author Malcolm Gladwell). One of Gladwell’s three best-sellers is Outliers: The Story of Success. Outliers is a book that describes the traits of successful people. Instead of focusing on the traits that most people do, such as intelligence, personality, and ambition; he focuses on traits such as their culture, experience, and their family. Outliers are people who achieve more than the average person, but according to Gladwell intelligence alone is not the way to achieve it. He believes that there are many other factors that contribute …show more content…

He emphasizes that there is no need to be naturally talented but with practice success can be achieved. “The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve…by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice”(Gladwell 38,39). According to Gladwell, practice plays a major role in success, not only the people who are naturally talented can be successful but also the individuals who work hard enough for it. Gladwell also argues that more hours in school are rigorous programs can lead to a higher success rate among students. In his last chapter he describes how a school in New York City called KIPP has overcame all expectations by creating a desirable school even though it is in a low-income environment. This school has longer days resulting in the teachers not having to rush through material. A student named Marita is a middle schooler who wakes up at 5:30 AM and doesn’t go home until 5 p.m. Gladwell argues that students like Marita could be successful because they take the opportunities given to them. Marita has to give up most of her time in order to attend to KIPP, but she will most likely attend college in the future because her school is preparing …show more content…

“How could that be a bad bargain? Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein” (Gladwell 267). Chris Langan, according to Gladwell, has currently the highest IQ; he is a genius but cannot be influential. Gladwell describes him as a genius without social intelligence. Langan did not finish college, he only went for a year and a half, accusing the school system of being unfair and calling schools such as Harvard “glorified corporations” (Gladwell 96). Another example he gave is Bill Gates, he described him as a successful person because he had the luck of having spent more than ten thousand hours as a programmer. His high school had a computer club in which he spent most of his time, when he had the chance to use his programming abilities he was already an expert because of his previous experience. Gladwell gave more reasons why a person could be an outlier, including birthdate, diligence, and rigorous schedule during childhood. All these can result in a person being an

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