Outliers Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers Malcolm Gladwell does an excellent job in taking the expected and making it the unexpected. He shows that although hard work and dedication are important to be successful, they are not the only determining factors. Each chapter started out with a story of someone who seemed to have risen from nothing into something, and he carefully broke the situation down and analyzed the time periods, what their religion/ ethnicity were, family life, and what was occurring in the world during their youth. In each part he connected back to previous stories/examples to continue making the point that it is almost impossible to truly make a successful career out of nothing on your own. By dividing the book into two parts he is able to really explain

In chapter four, “The Trouble with Geniuses Part Two,” Gladwell analyzes how social class can dictate how someone not in a position of power treats someone with a position of authority, “… the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.” (Gladwell 108) Children raised in middle-upper class families were taught that speaking up and asking questions was acceptable and important in modern society, whereas children who were raised in poverty or lower classes were never taught to have a sense of entitlement so they do not. In the second part of the book, Gladwell talks about flying planes and the “Power Distance Index” (PDI) and how the social customs of the country someone was raised in can negatively affect their ability to question authority. (Gladwell 204) In the first part he wrote analyzed America specifically and particular occurrences and in the second part he took America’s customs and compared them to other countries and

He describes a true outlier as someone who against all odds manages to be extraordinarily successful and remains a mystery in how that is achieved. In one chapter he talks about “The 10,000 hour rule” and how in order to master something you need to put in 10,000 hours of work to achieve that. While discussing Silicon Valley, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs he says, “The perfect age to be in 1975… old enough to be a part of the coming revolution… twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954-1955.” (Gladwell 65) Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born in 1955, the perfect year to be right on top of the coming technology revolution. Bill Gates had access to so many different computers in a time when having access to just one was an anomaly, the opportunities he had were extremely rare but occurred because of when and where he was