Analysis Of Malcolm Gladwell 's ' The Story Of Success '

In “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” Malcolm Gladwell discusses the social media and society changed how people and groups of interact with each other. The four students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. The Woolworth’s lunch counter denied service because of their race. They refused to leave until the dinner closed and protest grew. The four students protested widespread and people from different states started to join in four students. They were also protested to happen without social networking. There was incident that people protested against the communist government and received through Twitter Revolution. Gladwell emphasizes the importance of social media for

Having the mind and determination to become successful isn’t an easy task. Success isn’t considered a gift, it should be a hard task to achieve and it matters how it is accomplished. Success

By definition, success is a person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity. How an individual reaches the point of success is “not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky- but all critical to making them who they are” (285). Throughout the book, Outliers by Malcom Gladwell, the pieces of the secret to success are put together. Three parts of success include pure luck, the amount of time and effort put into working to achieve your goal and where you come from.

Time or Talent: Can someone be born gifted or do they have to ‘earn’ their talent? In order to be successful, 10,000 hours is required to become professional; however, in order to be successful one must be born in the right time and place. Malcolm Gladwell makes this argument by providing evidence that Bill Joy, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs were all born from 1952 and 1958 and now became some of the most successful people in the world by their twenties. In the chapter “The 10,000-Hour Rule”, Malcolm Gladwell uses tables and anecdotes of famous people in order to create a logical argument and effectively boost his reliability (ethos). However, in the process of using charts and anecdotal evidence, Gladwell creates many logical fallacies, which makes both his logos- and ethos-based arguments ineffective.

Does social media “shrink the world” by bringing us closer together? In his article Small Change, Malcom Gladwell asserts that social media might be connecting more people, but the bonds it forms allow us to stay comfortably separate and avoid impacting meaningful social reform. Gladwell makes it apparent that he believes social media and revolutions are unsuited for each other. His article, written just two months before the beginning of the Arab Spring, was written in response to what some contemporaries have dubbed, “The Twitter Revolution” in Moldova. This revolution, as well as another in Iran, was heralded as examples of the merits of social media, with some even nominating Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize due to their belief that Twitter had played a major role in these uprisings. Gladwell writes against a sentiment of righteousness and accomplishment that advocates of social media maintain in an attempt to convince people that the true motivation behind social change is conviction. He raises the point that while it is exceedingly easy for someone to join a cause, such as hitting a ‘like’ button, it is far more effortless for them to quit. This sentiment seems to be fueled mostly by opinion, looking only at how social media did not cause revolutions and avoiding analysis regarding how

10,000 hours is equivalent to 14 months, 60 weeks, 417 days, and success. Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, is an example of this, as he began programming his sophomore year of high school and continued in the “summers then the day and nights at his first year at Berkeley,” totaling about ten thousand hours (Gladwell 47). Bill Joy played an integral part in the creation of multiple computer programs still used today, and to get to that point he practiced programming. BIll Joy’s dedication to mastering his craft led him to work hard,

The 10,000 Hour Rule is the idea that 10,000 hours of practice is needed to become an expert at something. I don’t agree with this rule. I don’t think you need approximately 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. I say this because I also don’t believe that you need to be an expert at something to be successful at it. I believe that you only need more practice than those who you’re trying to compete with to be successful. It’s like the saying “practice makes perfect”. If you are practicing, you’re eventually going to be better than the person who’s not practicing regardless of how much talent they

Gladwell opts for the discussion of playing with the readers emotions, each of which affects a different demographic group. Thus, he succeeds in effectively creating a relationship between the audience and pathos using emotional appeal from the beginning to the end of his article. Gladwell uses “real world” problems to create a bond between his article and the reader, such as the racial profiling of terrorist and everyday people of the same descent. After meeting with New York City’s police commissioner, he states, ““We have a policy against racial profiling,” Raymond Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner, told me. “I put it in here in March of the first year I was here. It’s the wrong thing to do, and it’s also ineffective. If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent, in that case, who is going to be profiled?” If you guessed the British citizens of Pakistani descent, then you are correct. Most of the readers were likely not aware of New York City’s policy of racial profiling or any profiling laws and the negative effect it has on ethnic people for that matter. Gladwell is really toying with your emotions because he is using these metaphors to inhibit the feeling of being dejected within his audience. We tend as people to not worry about the sadness that is present in society, but Gladwell makes it a priority to bring out the sadness within the effects of racially profiling.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers, believes that working at something for 10,000 hours is required to achieve mastery and become a world class expert at anything. While this is a nice way of making it seem like anyone can be successful, it is simply not true. Some people will never achieve proficiency in a domain, no matter how much practice they put into it. There are a variety of factors that play into expertise besides practice and certain domains require much less practice than the magical 10,000 hour threshold that Gladwell established.

Dr. Seuss once said “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more thing that you learn, the more places you will go”. This quote was meant to emphasize that the more people learn, the more they will get out of it of life. After high school, students will either go to college or get a job that does not require much of a college degree and work like that for the rest of their life. While some people believe that college is not worth the cost, it can be argued that college is actually worth its cost because of better jobs and the income and college prepares the individual for life because of the challenges college brings.

To be successful has many interpretations, whether it be your own, from the dictionary or societies’ definition. Within Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell explains that being successful has nothing to do with what kind of person you are, so whether you’re intelligent and hardworking or lazy and aloof, it depends on your circumstances growing up. Whether your parents happen to be immigrants, you’re one of the smartest men in the country or you practice like there’s no tomorrow, your own personal success, according to Gladwell is defined by the conditions you grew up in; the idea of being successful varies from culture to culture and because of that there is no definite meaning of successful other than one’s interpretation.

In “Malcolm Gladwell Explains What Everyone Gets Wrong About His Famous 10,000 Hour Rule”, a quote by Gladwell is stated, saying, “And practice isn't a SUFFICIENT condition for success...The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest.” Here he begins to find a more middle ground, no longer entirely dedicating personal success to the 10,000 hour rule. When observing his diction, though, it is evident how he still largely believes in his idea through words like ‘SUFFICIENT’ and ‘huge’. Thus, the original intent of his thesis is what he concludes to be mainly true. This denounces the significance of inherent personal proficiency and prowess a human possesses at birth, and while Gladwell includes good description of how practice does shape certain aspects of individual accomplishment, he is incorrect in his extent of this assessment and fails to understand the role of natural ability in the overall idea of

“The Matthew Effect” in Gladwell’s Outliers is an assessment on the reasons of high levels of success. “The Matthew Effect” Is the observations of successful people who have gain more while people who lack something find it harder to achieve. It describes people who already have reputation are often positioned in situations where they gain more recognition and those that do not have reputation usually struggle to accomplish more. In addition, children who gain reading skills early as a result, find other areas of education easier to understand compared to the children who do not gain reading skills in an early age.

Malcolm Gladwell argues that hard work and practice has more value than “innate talent” (Gladwell 1) in an excerpt from Chapter 2 “The 10,000-Hour Rule” of his novel Outliers: The Story of Success. Although he acknowledges that talent can be a factor in success, Gladwell believes that a person’s choice to work hard is what ultimately determines their achievements. To support this claim, he alludes to famous musicians and cites psychologists and other scientists to establish credibility, with the attempt to convince the audience that hard work overrules talent. His passage has a very clear and academic tone, making it easy for the audience to understand and not get confused.

One of these rebuttals is the claim that mastery can be achieved through talent alone. To refute this statement, Gladwell uses the examples of the master chess players and the international basketball stars. These people reached the top of their field in nearly half the time of others, but Gladwell points out that they did not truly become masters. The chess players reached the lowest level of mastery attainable and the international basketball players had not yet been pitted against NBA players, thought by most to be the best in the world. Gladwell declares “Arguments about what it takes to be an elite performer are less persuasive if the performers being studies aren’t actually