Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story Of Success

Many people like me, believe success comes in general two ways, luck and hard work. Some of us get lucky and are born into a family of wealth and that pushes us ahead of our peers on the success rate while others spend hours of continuous practice to push them ahead. Up until now I always believed success was what people made of their own situations. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell argues that this belief is only partially true. Many factors contribute to making a person an outlier with success such as uncontrollable opportunities or factors, hard work, community ties, practice, patronage and parentage. I believe that true success lies within the midst of all these contributions, it just takes the right person to find the

Gladwell discusses the studies done that show that practice is what it takes to become an expert. According in Outliers, it takes 10,000 hours of diligent practice to become an expert. Although I never reached the expert level of being a kicker, I did learn that hard work and practice truly does set the mediocre apart from the excellent. Walking onto a team with forty-five guys who grew up playing one of the toughest sports in our area was very intimidating. Truthfully, I was unaware of the common mechanics of football and learned after the first day of practice, it was going to be a long year. I spent the first week kicking two hours each night and rarely ever making an extra point. As much as I was hoping that I would be a natural gifted kicker, that was not the case. I realized in order to be able to compete with other kickers around my area, I had to be fully devoted to practice. My mornings before school consisted of going to the weight room to build more muscle, watching film on how to improve accuracy and distance, and stretching to increase my flexibility. The two-hour practices ended each night for everyone on the team, but mine lasted until the field darkened and I could not see the uprights any longer. Eventually my coaches noticed my hard work and started truly wanting me to excel. They spent hours with me after practice teaching me proper form and the ideal way to find the sweet spot of the ball. I went to camps designed only for the fundamentals of being a placement kicker. Many times, while my muscles ached and I felt fatigued from not resting, I thought about quitting. However, despite the hardships and soreness I continued because the number of hours I practiced and the uncontrollable opportunity to play was more beneficial than