Book Review Of Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Undoubtedly, the novel Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell altered my perspective on the successful as well as how they ascended to the top. In his novel, Gladwell argues against the grossly oversimplified view that has become popular belief: the success of an individual hinges solely upon the individual. When discussing the lives of the successful, we have a tendency to concentrate on the internal factors influencing the success of the individual in question. Such factors include intelligence, drive, and other meritorious attributes. However, Malcolm Gladwell paints a different picture than the one we have already made up in our minds. He points out in his novel that internal factors alone do not suffice when trying to explain

Both internal and external factors unionize to form a potent concoction characteristic of outliers everywhere. For illustration, examine the life of 17-year-old high school student Kwasi Enin, who gained acceptance into all 8 Ivy League colleges. The USA Today article asserts, “For most of the eight schools, acceptance comes rarely, even among the USA's top students. At the top end, Cornell University admitted only 14% of applicants. Harvard accepted just 5.9%” (Toppo 1). Without a doubt, being admitted into just one of these prestigious universities is arduous enough. However, Kwasi Enin went eight for eight, dropping jaws everywhere. Clearly, the life of this prodigious scholar is everything but

Not everyone can be beneficiaries on par with Bill Gates, Bill Joy, or the Beatles. However, I present a question to my audience: why not? Why must we fall victim to our socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, creed, stigmas, birth date, generation, and so on? If society rendered everyone with the same opportunities, individuals would only have to decide whether to seize them. Undoubtedly, there would be those individuals who would choose not to. Nevertheless, innumerable others would make hay while the sun shines. Simply put, our world would flourish if everyone were furnished with a chance. However, such a seemingly ideal world is not foreseeable anytime soon. Sadly, American society is being cleaved in two due to inequality of opportunities among American children, a problem that The New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks shed light on in his article “The Opportunity Gap.” This opinion piece contrasts the lives of American children at opposite extremes of the affluence scale. The dissimilarities are quite considerable. For illustration, David Brooks asserts, “Recently, more affluent parents have invested much more in their children’s futures while less affluent parents have not” (Brooks 1). More specifically, the parents at the upper end of the affluence scale have invested more time and money in their children than parents at the lower end of the affluence scale do. The article states, “A