Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, Gladwell argues the true story of success. In chapters three and four, he emphasizes main factors successful people need. The intelligence of a person is not a good predictor of how well the person will be, instead, the family background and the environment a person grows up in play important roles in his or her way to success. In chapter three, Gladwell first introduces Chris Langan, a man who has a high IQ and attended the TV show one vs. one hundred. Then, Gladwell goes on to introduce an experimental “Stanford Binet” by Professor Lewis Terman at Stanford University, he tracks a group of children with high IQ scores. According to the results of Terman’s intelligence test, Gladwell points out people only …show more content…

In order to explain this idea, Gladwell introduce Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer, who were born with high IQ but have different achievements. I agree with Gladwell’s idea, “the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point.”(79). Because Gladwell first uses Lewis Terman’s study to support his idea, “By the time Terman was finished, he had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students”. (74) This data has amount of numbers, which makes this result universal and reliable. However, nor were these Termites any Nobel Prize winners. Gladwell illustrates his idea that successful people are not only having high IQ by using Terman’s study successfully. In addition, Gladwell uses Liam Hudson’s discovery of basketball players to tell readers “A basketball player only has to be tall enough—and the same is true of intelligence.”(80) To my point of view, Gladwell’s idea is reliable is because he uses well-known scientists’ studies and a lot of data to support his ideas. The example of the relationship between basketball players and height is easy to make readers understandable. However, from the other factor of being successful, Gladwell only uses Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer to support his idea. In my opinion, these two people are minority and extreme example. What is still lacking here is a grasp of universality. Not all the smart people from rich family will have a good achievement. They were less common in being successful. Gladwell’s claim lacks credibility because in my research, they are a lot of successful people are from poor