The Secret of Outliers

The outliers I have grown up hearing about include Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. These people, just like any other extremely successful people, work harder than everybody else to be to where they are. Also, they are willing to fail, because they know that in order to succeed they must learn from their failures. Clearly, to become extremely successful a person has to have that burning passion for what he or she does, has to do more than what is required, and has to be talented. Talent alone is not enough to become the world’s next billionaire. Talent, preparation, opportunity, and connections are needed to become an outlier. In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell shows just how equally important luck and opportunity is to having talent. Gladwell emphasizes throughout the book that one of the keys to being successful is being born at the right time. When Gladwell is talking about the world’s seventy-five richest people of all time he remarks, “Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century” (Gladwell 61). This was a very interesting observation to me. All of those fourteen people were extremely lucky to be born when they did. They were born in the perfect time period, right as America’s economy began to boom and as industrial manufacturing became more important than ever. By being born in that time period, those fourteen people took advantage of the immense opportunities and paths that were available for them. This example is the epitome of how important opportunity and luck is. If opportunities or chances, that could change a person’s life if he or she take advantage of them, are not given then success will be unattainable. Opportuni... ... middle of paper ... ...so bad that I was thinking that my parents were mistreating me. In reality when compared to the rest of the world, people might think that people like me are spoiled. I am at such a greater advantage to succeed in the world then my pen pal because I have parents there helping me daily and I am given numerous opportunities to learn more and go to the next level. Usually we think of those anomalies as outliers, but people like many children in East Cobb, we are also considered outliers. We have so many more opportunities to succeed, we were born into the right family in the right place, and we learn many vital skills that many kids never learn. Outliers has given me a new perspective on success and makes me feel thankful for who I am and who surrounds me. Works Cited Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2008. Print.