Malcolm Gladwell's Influence On Black Youth

The author explains exactly what the professional asserts and how particular pieces of evidence relate to Gladwell’s unconventional idea of success.

“There is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success” (Gladwell 18). In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell is trying to convince his audience that they misunderstand how people become successful. Many believe one only needs hard work and determination in order to achieve success. However, Gladwell complicates this idea by explaining that hard work and determination is not how people become successful and instead, it is all about the opportunities one is given that decides if he or she is successful or not. Gladwell uses the rhetorical appeals of pathos and ethos in order to persuade his audience to accept his idea of the process of becoming successful.

In summing up Gladwell’s argument, the lesson he forwards is very simple. If we continue to believe in the myth of the “self-made” individual, we will continually seek out some strange gifted individual that never existed. In order to be more effective as a society or better stated, a world community,

Gladwell’s main idea in this chapter is that if you don't have support or someone to help you. It doesn't no matter how smart, talented, or wealthy you are. You need someone to help you along their journey to success.

In the novel Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, he explores the idea of of misunderstandment of relationships among individual talent and opportunities. Gladwell argues this statement by showing that talent is necessary but not the reason to achieve success. I agree with Gladwells statement: The opportunities that are offered creates a straight path to success.

In Outliers, Gladwell attempts to answer, What makes some people successful while others cannot seem to realize their full potential? In U.S. society, people are considered successful when they have traits and characteristics: self-sacrifice, intelligence, talent. However, He says that the conditions and circumstances surrounding our lives are the significant influential factors that determine our success, not our inner ability or talent. These talents and abilities allow these people to be separate from society.

Gladwell states, “ Gladwell states, “ Their 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."(pg. 285) This quote from Outliers shows how Gladwell almost undermines certain people’s success. No matter who the person is, in order to have a virtuous life full of fortune you need to put in an ample amount of time and effort. David K. Lee is a philanthropist and owner of Hing Wa Lee jewelers. Lee inherited the jewelry business when he was a young man and he is now a part of the billionaires club. Gladwell would argue that David Lee got his fortune from opportunity because he inherited his dad’s jewelry company. This logic is interminably flawed. Inheriting the jewelry company could have helped him reach his success, but Lee’s personal merit is what helped him make his way to the top. If lee just ran the jewelry shop like it was being run when his father gave it up, he would have never been as financially sound as he is now. Instead, Lee ventured out and broadened the businesses horizons and made it a major brand selling business, selling huge names such as Rolex, Audemars and peu, and Hublot. Lee’s ambition to make his dad’s jewelry company something much better is what made him make millions of dollar. It wasn’t the opportunity. Even if David K. Lee didn’t inherit Hing Wa Lee Jewelers, he would have found another way to put his innovative mind to work in order to create a

In Outliers: The Story of Success Malcolm Gladwell argues that success is not earned through talent. He states that success is obtained through forces people can not control such as luck and opportunities giving to them by others. Success is also gained through backgrounds and the year in which one is born. To support his argument Gladwell uses facts, statistics, and a few anecdotes.

Gladwell had several ideas he had based people’s successes on, one of which were their skills. He focused on whether a person was capable of being successful in their career path. Not just their IQ, or their ability to perform a task well, but whether their social skills were also capable or not. Gladwell states that it is not possible to make it far alone, so he would check to see if an individual wasn’t an awkward loner who excelled in only academically. Gladwell would not only look at SAT scores and how well they did in school, but look at how creative or innovative an individual was.

Essentially, the topics Gladwell covered in this book include are, being at the right place at the right time, the 10,000-hour rule, timing, upbringing, and pursuing a meaningful career. Although all of these have been proven by Gladwell to be a major component of success, I do not agree with the idea of a particular upbringing will determine success. With this idea, Malcolm also includes that

Often, we would think about how successful people have extraordinary talent and intelligent. Although talent and intelligent are important aspects when considering successful people, Gladwell points out different perspective by taking a closer look at into their cultural. Gladwell's exposition on success through specific

Most people normally bring about personal qualities when they think for the main components of success. However, Malcolm Gladwell, a famous writer, contradicts the assumption of people through the book, Outliers. Gladwell insists that extrinsic factors define success rather than the personal qualities. Nonetheless, Gladwell himself goes against the topic of Outliers in his assertion about hard working “if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires”. Although people should work hard to seize the opportunity for success, success actually came from extrinsic factors because opportunity of relative age gives physical and emotional advantages through appropriate timing for birth, opportunity to raise under the concerted cultivation increases one’s practical intelligence, and opportunity to fulfill 10,000 hours of practice guarantees time to achieve success at every field.

Being great at something doesn’t guarantee success, and Gladwell states it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. That’s why it is imperative to choose something that can make one successful to ripen into an expert in. An example would be a person becoming an expert at folding clothes. Just because that person became an expert they are more than likely not going to become successful from that particular skill. An example Gladwell gave was the Beatles whom spent an extensive amount of hours practising at Hamburg. Their talents were undefined and crude before they would go on to play for many consecutive hours at Hamburg. After they received 10,000 hours of practice they initiated a long and successful journey that led to their

Gladwell pushes in his thesis that one cannot be successful and come from nothing and that they need the benefits of a nurturing upbringing to give them the chance to use their merit for success. However, when one does not have the ingredients to success, all of the effort and merit does not reach high enough to make up for the lack of opportunities to be successful. Gladwell states that one’s effort and passion is only useful once they have all the opportunities available to them. Gladwell would argue that Franklin’s success is due to his father’s influence and the people who surrounded him, the places his resided in, and his birth date. Franklin would not be a self-made man but a man that took his beneficial upbringing, opportunities, and applied his determination to succeed and be the accomplished figure he is considered today.

I agree with Gladwell’s assertion because success is not something you can accomplish so easily. If Gladwell's assertion can be put into other words it can be saying that hard work, a good mind, and a vivid imagination can lead you to your own success. An example of this would be from the story “Kewauna's Ambition” by Paul Tough. In Kewauna's ambition Kawana is a 17 year old student. “On the fast track to derailing her life, Kewauna did an about face during her junior year of high school. She still lived at the poverty level on the Southside of Chicago, picking fights at school and struggling academically. But a spark was lighted inside of Kewauna through a mentoring program and encouragement from her mother and