Summary Of Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

The stories told to people from their families throughout their lives act as personal psychics influencing their futures and helps to explain the reasoning behind the choices their family makes. These stories or family behaviors that people influence subconsciously are called cultural legacies which author of nonfiction book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell defines it as “powerful forces that play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them,” (175). Gladwell explains the cruciality of cultural legacies in people’s success and decisions and how these stories and family characteristics are such a prominent factor in how people function. Furthermore, these legacies remain

The results showed that students from the south of America let the insult impact them much more than the students from northern America (173). Gladwell explains that southern Americans are faster to anger because in the early times of establishing America the families in the south had to fight for their land and livestock, which resulted in them to use their fists before their words to assert dominance (168). The area where families are from lead to the different cultural stories or their experiences that they might tell their children which influence the family’s morals and the reasoning of their decisions. Gladwell explains the concept of cultural legacies, the stories, and behaviors that passed down from generations to generations, with a study of the culture of honor in America to show how vitally important these legacies are in people’s lives and their opportunities with contributions to their path to

These three essential functions are argued for their importance by nonfiction author Elizabeth Stone in her book How Our Family Stories Shape Us, and both authors argue for how legacies affect the decisions of the person, significant or not and the how these legacies remain despite the long family history. Gladwell emphasizes what people’s family can do regarding how successful they will be, while Stone emphasizes the decisions made throughout one’s life, without focusing on the result. Both authors highlight how people do not attribute the personalities people possess to their family, but to their individualism, when then cause is from the opposite. Stone’s argument is about how each family’s life experiences told in stories that are passed down from each generation are significant in the family’s norms and mores, characteristic traits, and coping strategies. These functions lead to the core of the person, the first of the three functions is the standards of the family, their norms and morals since our family act as our first culture, teaching people what their family values and their opinions on certain situations like marriage and illness, mental or physical (384). The second factor is the family’s character and their traits that