Malcolm Gladwell's 'Building A Smart Mind'

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers, a novel depicting success, provides different examples of how an individual can achieve success in every chapter of his book to show his audience that success, despite a variety of barriers, is in fact in our control. A very important chapter titled, “Marita's Bargain”, explains the flaws in today’s public school systems. He shows the problems with the solutions to fix them while showing the alternatives to the regular system such as the KIPP Program in New York. The KIPP Program (Knowledge is Power Program) is a new kind of middle school that selects students from less fortunate locations and uses unique teaching strategies to turn them around into fantastic learners. In the chapter, Gladwell is extremely descriptive by using visual words to paint the picture of the South Bronx in New York City. He describes the buildings that were built in the 1960’s as squat and bleak looking. Gladwell had an interest in this subject as it involves success, however he had no prior experiences to produce the piece. Gladwell establishes personal credibility through the use of knowledge, reason, and facts and figures. He comes across very knowledgeable on the subject presenting great data with excellent vocabulary. He is able to do this with no obvious bias as well. Gladwell shows authority because he is well known for writing novels that involve success. His intention is to teach and explain how schools need to change the length of vacation breaks

In Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, “The power of thinking without thinking” is the central idea that Gladwell conveys through his many anecdotes alongside his scientific evidence. In Blink, though scientific evidence comes into play a lot, most of his evidence can be found daily if we examine ourselves. When the psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson did the “priming” experiment with black college students and the twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, a test for entry in graduate school, upon making them identify their race just “that simple action was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement- and the number of items they got right was cut in half. (Page 56, Chapter 2. ) This can bring us to the notion that if you can be “primed” to be inferior, you can be “primed” to be superior. As Gladwell put it, “If a white student from a prestigious private

Criminal case is always tedious when it involves little or no information about the offender, like in the 9/11 terrorist attack which annihilated most of the workers in and damaged the New York Trade Center building. However, in an attempt to identify the offenders, government officials and investigators try out different ways such as criminal profiling and others. Thus, in the New Yorker article, “Dangerous Minds” by Malcolm Gladwell; the author informs the deeper problems with FBI profiling and argues that it is ineffective. He questions the usefulness of criminal profiling, “But how useful is that profile, really?” and uses other criminal cases, group research analyses, and analogies to refute

In Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Small Change: The Revolution will not be Tweeted” There is an example of large-scale change which caused by the social media there was Twitter revolution at Moldova, Iran in 2009. People started to use Twitter as a tool for protest the government and it became a huge change. This could be possible because people could argue with more confident when they stand up against government through the Social Media. The Malcolm Gladwell’s response about this kind of social event was “Social media, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making I easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns” (Paragraph 7, Gladwell) Also he called

Thoughts can be fleeting, however some of the feelings resulting from thought and can have a long lasting impact on the mental state of a person. In my metacognitive exploration I found an interesting comparison between the way in which I think and approach my past feelings and the methods which Tim O’Brien, from The Things They Carried, and Paul D from Beloved express their thinking about the past. I have discovered that the expression of thoughts, including memories and feelings, is the key to a healthy mental state of a person.

Gladwell uses Korean airplane crashes and Asian children being good at math to support his arguments on cultural legacy playing a part in being successful. In these countries there is a high level of respect and a strong foundation of hard work that contributes to these two events. The respect created the plane crashes since co pilots fear speaking up to their superiors, and the foundation of hard work drives the children to put their all into their work. Gladwell takes these properties and applies them to a school named KIPP in New York City that supposedly uses cultural legacy to help make their students succeed. The problem with this that Gladwell presents cultural legacy as being heritage linked. KIPP school is duplicating the actions of

Expertise is something many people look at as coincidence. They see it as something that merely happens to someone. Malcolm Gladwell, however, studied how one attains this status. He proposed that it takes 10,000 hours of practice put into something to truly become an expert at it. Proficiency at a skill does not come automatically. It takes time and effort to really master anything.

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell follows trends from their beginning to their end and he tries to figure out why some ideas "tip" and others do not. Firstly, Gladwell gives the three rules for the tipping point which are: contagiousness, the fact that little causes can have big effects, and transformation happens in one moment.

According to Gladwell’s article a national organization of schools should be built on character. Knowledge is power program (kipp) allows students to do so by creating a foundation based on the SSLANT protocol. This protocol is where a student is taught to sslant (smile, sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track during class. SSLANT is highly successful when it comes to the subject of mathematics, unlike a regular educational system these students that are enrolled in KIPP schools find the subject to be that of their most liking when they complete the course. In addition the KIPP educational system believes in a student attending a class discussion

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is a book intended to inform the readers about the vast mystery of the mind. The book goes off to talk about science projects and/or tests, that were conducted on humans which essentially allows the reader to learn a little more about the mystery of the mind. The mind has exposed itself to the public many times, and it’s the first thing the book doesn’t fail to do. Blink has been intentionally written to be easier to understand by the public, it is a combination of many stories that as an end result gives a closer look on how the brain works. For the most part, each chapter is designed to inform the reader of the many different ways the brain can function. The chapter The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Decisions,

The Tipping Point, written by Malcolm Gladwell, attempts to explain how epidemics start. Malcolm Gladwell defines The Tipping Point as, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point". This book looks into that point in which ideas someone has, products being sold, and messages from shows spread in the same way a virus does. There are three aspects described in this book which are The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context.

The argument behind "Geniuses" is that not all individuals with the privilege of having an IQ higher than 100, have the opportunity to be successful in life. Many may, like Langan, fall behind for various reasons and not be able to hold the fort down in the education and work aspects of their lives. This can happen to any individual no matter if you have a great IQ or not. Gladwell contextualizes his argument by giving his readers a way to visualize such an aspect in someone's life. He does so by giving us, as his readers, a look into the lives of various individual's such as Langan. He gives us details of their lives so we can better understand that being a "Genius" is sometimes not all that it's shown to be. The contextual perspective Gladwell

Individuals do this when they are not even thinking about it. Individuals do this when meeting new people, walking down the street, looking for a new shampoo, or even choosing a restaurant. What is it that individuals are doing you might ask? They thin slice constantly throughout their life and they do not realize it while it is happening.

In the chapter eight, Gladwell asserts that students from eastern countries have a better math skill than students from western countries is due to hard working and practice. Gladwell argues the attitudes on hard working and practice could trace back to the differences in agriculture. China is a county with high demand on rice, but majority Chinese farmers cannot afford of equipment to help them plan the corps, so they have use human labors to improve their yields by calculating their time and manage the water levels, fertilization, and harvest time (Gladwell 233). However, farmers from western countries do not have the chance to practice their math skill because they could afford of the equipment to help them plan about the corps. Therefore,

When someone is passionate about something, it becomes their talent or hobby. If they want to pursue that and make it more than a talent or specialty, they might make it their career. One talent that can easily be turned into a career is writing. There are a countless amount people who are passionate about writing and become authors or writers. An author, in particular who is excellent at writing and great at constructing solid arguments, is Malcolm Gladwell. In “Complexity and the Ten Thousand Hour Rule”, author Malcolm Gladwell constructs his argument that in cognitively demanding fields there are no naturals, by using anecdotes, quoting experts, and providing statistics.