Success: A Collaboration Of Success

Success: A Collaboration of Various Elements Is there a recipe for success? A list of perfect ingredients that when combined in precisely the right way, unfailingly produces success for the chef? The simple answer is no; success stories vary from person to person. Certainly, without a strong work ethic and drive even the most lucky of the successful would have never gotten where they are now. However, success is due to plenty of factors besides an individual’s motivation, without which their success would look very different, or perhaps be nonexistent. Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that “if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires” is contradicted repeatedly in Outliers:

Often, success is rooted in factors beyond an individual’s knowledge or control. These exterior forces may vary greatly in all aspects except one: the successful individual has no power over them. Society likes to paint famed success as the result of years of arduous work in which an individual seizes every opportunity and eventually sees all of his struggles pay off as his goals are achieved. Sure, success would have been a distant dream if not for the seizure of opportunities and all that hard work, “but in fact [people who stand before kings] are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot” (Gladwell 19). Take, for example, the story of a successful career man who made his living for 39 years thanks to a conversation behind closed doors of which he was not aware until he inquired about it years later. Greg Counts spent all but the first few years of his career in transportation and logistics because of a job he took in the first few years of his life after college. The

Without those specific circumstances or connections, success would not be the reality many know today. Malala Yousafzai is a 20 year old woman who is the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize due to her work in the fight for women’s education and against the Taliban. “In October 2012, Malala was targeted by the Taliban and shot in the head as she was returning from school on a bus. She miraculously survived and continues her campaign for education” (Yousafzai Third Cover). Malala would certainly be standing up for what she believed in and fighting for the educational rights of women today, even if she had never been shot that day on the bus. However, it is undoubtedly that specific circumstance which earned her her world fame and rocketed her forward in her campaign against such forces as the Taliban. It could thus be argued that Malala’s success in her field is due, in large part, by the extremely unfortunate circumstances of an October afternoon in 2012. This is not uncommon in the realm of success. Many successful people owe their achievements to specific events or people in their lives who, sometimes unbenounced to them, changed the course of their success from that point onward. “No one- not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone” (Gladwell 115) Self-advocacy and drive can only take an