The Outliers Gladwell Analysis

Malcom Gladwell, the author of The Outliers, analyzes the factors to success based on real-life example. Through statistical facts and logical reasoning, he attempts to prove how success is more than just hard work and being intelligent. He supports his arguments with accurately calculated statistical facts to gain the trust of his audience and to work towards 2proving his points. Gladwell determines the reasons of success by comparing well-known successful people and finding commonalities between those people. Gladwell does not believe anyone can be a self-made man. He believes people are successful because of their families and circumstances while growing up. I understand how he would have formed this conjecture, but I disagree with his

Generally the social structure in a community is split into a hierarchy, so all of the richer and “more successful” people are socially connected. Anyone coming from a financially stable family is more likely going to afford attending a very prestigious university or school as they are also on the higher side of the spectrum for tuition costs. Gladwell points out that having an insanely high IQ, amazing athletic skills, or savvy communication skills alone are not enough to make people successful because “no one – not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses – ever makes it alone” (Gladwell 115). Friends and family play a big role in each other’s life. My mother, comparatively, did much better than my father in school. One of the reason’s she was a better student was because she had a lot of support from her friends. The friends that she hung out with were also family friends because my mother’s and their families enjoyed spending time together and were socially similarly structured. Her and her family lived in the same city since my mother was born, so she grew up with the same friends and attended the same school for years. My father lived in many cities growing up because my grandfather worked in the Indian air forces, so he did not have many of the same friends growing up and went many different school. My mother and her friends enjoyed

Talent and opportunity and many times use interchangeably although they both have very different meaning. To me, talent is the innate ability to do something or learn something which a small percentile of people possess. Opportunity is a set of options which a person chooses to shape their paths. Both are similar in the way that neither can be controlled by humans (for the most part). Some people are more successful because they have more talent for a particular area of interest, but most are successful because of the opportunities they received along the way. Preparation comes into play when the opportunity has been taken. Opportunities can motivate people to work harder. Gladwell uses the example of the ages of the Canadian hockey teams because there were “an incredible number of January, February, and March birth dates” (Gladwell 22). The cutoff dates for the pee wee hockey teams in Canada is January 1st, so all the boys born from January 2nd and onwards were put in the lower division teams so they were generally bigger and stronger than the boys born 10 or 11 months after them. It did not mean that the January boys had more talent, they just had a better opportunity because the coach would select the biggest and strongest players to play in the elite hockey team. A similar situation I faced was in Tae Kwon Do. We are divided into groups based on our ages. People from my