...Liliana Tenorio Sherry AP Psychology - 3 27 August 2015 Book Review: Outliers Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers explores the societal forces that give opportunity to individuals willing to put in the effort to become successful. Through the events and experiments he has researched, Gladwell has come to the conclusion that to become a successful person you must be given a specific and miraculous string of opportunities that pave the way for you, insisting that there is no such creature as a “self-made man”. He argues that they “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.” In scientific terms an...
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...In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: A Story of Success, Gladwell challenges a reader’s perception of, well…success. In the book, he shifts the reader’s prior basic understanding of success and focuses instead on all the hidden, underlying biases and correlations of success. He proposed the notion that the month one was born in can separate the great athletes from the average, that how high your IQ is may not actually matter as much as many people are lead to believe it does, and that a number can be put on the amount of time one would need to practice in order to become proficient in a particular skill. Yet another example to add to the previously mentioned list of unfair advantages in the road to success, it has been found in numerous studies that even one's name can affect things ranging from your salary to how others can perceive you in general. When going after a job or promotion in any professional American setting, not only would one have to fulfill the asked of requirements, one must look the part and even sound the part. According to a study conducted by TheLadders, an online job matching site, every extra letter in a person’s first name may lead to a reduction in that person’s annual salary by $3,600. In the grand scheme of things, that’s a lot of lost money just for having a few extra letters in one's name. By this logic, there’s no wonder why many people in the business field opt to go by nicknames such as a William to a Bill or even just from a...
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...Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” is a book that exposes the hidden patterns of everyday life especially when it comes down to success and some prominent figures in modern day or in the past. For example he uses Bill Gates, The Beatles, a man with an IQ of 195, and students in Asian countries, to show how their pasts, cultures, uncanny dedication, and rare circumstances led them to be what they were. He does this in an intriguingly simplistic manner, in that he uses common sense to expose reasons and develop connections on why these people’s past have such a big influence on how they handle situations and have the tools to become successful. Gladwell takes an alternative to the common thought that natural ability and ‘god-given’ talent isn’t...
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...Army Four-Star General, Colin Powell, once claimed that “success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence” (BrainyQuote). People have a natural tendency to believe wholeheartedly in this claim due to the hope that it provides. The hope offers a concept that hard work will allow anyone, in any situation, to succeed. This idea is a key principle in the founding of America, clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence that “...all men are created equal” (Article I, Section II, Clause I). This foundation causes most Americans have it deeply ingrained in their minds that success is the product of hard work alone. The method of reaching success is closely scrutinized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers....
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...Through multiple cases, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” challenges the theories that success is self-made. He discovers hidden advantages and opportunities that allowed for people to become successful. He defines an outlier as “a person who doesn't fit into our normal understanding of achievement”, and attempts to convince the reader these outliers are beneficiaries or extraordinary opportunity and special circumstances. Part one of “Outliers” is centered around “The Matthew Effect”, stemming from the Bible, as in Matthew, one of the disciples just happened to be at the right place, right time, when Jesus picked him to become a disciple. The statistical advantage of time is looked at extensively in chapter one. After attending a Canadian professional...
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...From Jay Gatsby to Don Draper, the self-made man is a staple of American fiction. It is not very difficult to understand why. They speak to a central aspect of the American creation myth: the idea that no matter where you are from, no matter who you are, America is the land of opportunity. There is certainly a significant measure of skepticism towards this notion in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contemporary take on the Jazz Age, but there nevertheless exists a widely held romantic view of these characters, and of the myth they represent, even if it’s not encouraged by the creators of these fictions. In Malcolm Gladwell’s inspiring novel Outlier illustrates the many ways in which society’s most successful people benefit from hidden advantages, and offers some compelling thoughts on how to level the playing field. Gladwell’s central argument, that no one rises to the pinnacle of their profession without many advantages, seems at first hardly controversial....
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...Throughout the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell specifically and cautiously releases detail and information. In order to become successful, Gladwell provides a story of how ordinary individuals become extremely successful through unique opportunities to work hard, to practice extensively, and to award for their extraordinary effort. Gladwell presents his discoveries of how individuals reach success by providing evidence that even well-known celebrities have to work hard to reach their level of success. Through his research, Gladwell exploits the faults in society’s idea of success and explains that intelligence, luck, and other factors are not directly related with achieving success; he states, “I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing… it is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” While developing his thesis, Gladwell uses the lives of well-known celebrities and how their achieved success supports his argument. Gladwell argues that people need...
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...Liam Webster Mrs. Kennan AP Language and Composition 30 August 2017 Outliers Rhetorical Strategies The book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell consists of rhetorical strategies within the composition. The three strategies most used are persuasion, repetition, and exemplification. These are used to show the reader about what success really is and the troubles with it. Persuasion in this book is one key part in the plot of the book.One example of this is “ In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work.” (Gladwell 19). In this Gladwell wants to state that he is trying to convince the reader what success is. Success is a result of looking into others achievements and how they thrive while another...
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...Malcolm Gladwell, in his nonfiction book Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), asserts that although success is somewhat related to innate talent and ambition, the ones who are truly successful have the ability to recognize and seize opportunities as well. Gladwell also states that seemingly unrelated external factors such as birth dates, culture, and environment are a crucial part of becoming a success. Throughout the book, the author strives to thoroughly explore the mystery of success. He reinforces his main idea through a multitude of stories pertaining to success and failure; the book includes stories of the Beatles, Bill Gates, and Korean Air. In the first chapter, Gladwell proves to us that the the birthdates of junior hockey players...
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...In a chapter titled “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, Gladwell explains why it seems that Eastern Asians are always better at math than other ethnicities. Part of it has to do with the shortness of their numbers. A lot of their numbers have short, syllable-long pronunciations that increase their memory of number sequences, which allows them to perform mental math efficiently. This is why those of Eastern Asian heritage are often much better at math classes than those of American and European descent. Their language gives them a great benefit in the math area, and they are often very successful because of it. Other races struggle because of a lack of schooling or inadequate education in the past, such as African...
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...o In addition to The Entrepreneurial Process, we also read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. In the book, Gladwell explores some of differentiating factors behind success such as family and upbringing. While we tend to focus on the founder, there are many outside influences that give an individual the opportunity to achieve success. For example, in chapter 6, Gladwell mentioned, “cultural legacies are powerful forces.” Lei Jun grew up in an industrial area and his parents were teachers who made around 300 Chinese Yuan a month, which is equivalent to $50 today. As a young child, he was instilled with the values of perseverance and hard work. Furthermore, as teachers, his parents were very involved in his education and pushed him to excel in the classroom....
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...In Outliers: The Story of Success, the book is made up entirely of a series of studies done to make connections to theories that have are well-known. Malcolm Gladwell’s style for writing Outliers includes having many examples to originally pinpoint the theory he has tested out. Malcolm Gladwell has his own theory of Success in the novel. He believes success is made up of many key points such as, personal opportunity, class background, what parenting styles you’ve been exposed to, and working habits. All in all, he believes an individual's success can be determined by a few key things. Chapter One of Outliers is titled “The Matthew Effect”. This chapter begins by accessing the place where the theory first came to exist. The chapter opens...
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...Most parents have the best intentions for their child and have to make decisions that will impact the rest of their lives. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell discusses redshirting and how it affects the American education system. Redshirting is when parents have the choice to hold their kids back another year before kindergarten to have their child avoid being the youngest in class. Parents are arguing whether or not redshirting gives children an advantage or disadvantage when it comes to their education, as it is a decision that affects their whole 12 years of school. Redshirting should be supported because it allows children to mature and develop before attending school. Researchers studied test scores of elementary school...
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...Haitham Mishal Engl 1A 0013 Prof. Nathan Connolly 28 November 2017 Outliers Homework #5 In Outliers, Gladwell conjectures why a few people have achievement path outside of measurable standards. These factual exceptions, accomplish at levels considerably higher than ordinary effective people do. One could state that Gladwell really alludes to his contention in the subtitle of his book. As indicated by his hypothesis of progress, it is the story encompassing a person that decides achievement considerably more so than a person's drive, knowledge or other individual attributes over which he states and explains in his book. In Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, as most well-known books managing examples of overcoming adversity,...
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...Malcolm Gladwell portrayed the prominent message of achieving success through coincidence, luck and the individual’s passion for the matter in his book “Outliers”. Success starts with opportunity, this is exemplified when Gladwell provided a chart containing information about one of Canada’s National Hockey teams players, and in this chart the players birthdates were shown to prominantly in the months of January, Febuary, and March. This is because in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1st . A child who is turning 10 on January 2nd , can play next to a child who will not be turning 10 untill the end of the year, and at that age there is an enourmous difference in physical maturity, giving the older child a better opportunity to be a faster , stronger , and more experienced hockey player....
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