Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

How many hours of someone’s life are necessary to perfect a skill? 300? 5000? Perhaps try 10,000 hours. In this chapter from Outliers, “The 10,000-Hour Rule”, Malcolm Gladwell argues that talent isn’t innate, but takes 10,000 hours to perfect a skill based on opportunity, talent, and practice. Throughout the chapter “The 10,000-Hour Rule”, Malcolm Gladwell effectively relies on logos--evidence from well-known figures and charts that show age similarities--to support his theory that it takes a particular window of time to offer someone the opportunity to practice for 10,000 hours to succeed at a skill. However, Gladwell ineffectively relies on repetition of evidence and failure to

Malcolm Gladwell insists throughout his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, that the recipe for achievement is not simply based on personal talents or innate abilities alone. Gladwell offers the uncommon idea that outliers largely depend upon “extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies” (Gladwell19). According to Gladwell, successful men and women are beneficiaries of relationships, occasions, places, and cultures. The author draws on a different case study in each chapter to support a particular argument concerning success. Despite his indifference and suppression in regards to counterarguments, Gladwell’s claims are effective for many reasons, including through the accounts of experts, tone and style of writing, and the

“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 many instances, those who are successful are made out to be some sort of separate breed, those who were innately able to perform remarkable feats that others, no matter how hard they tried, simply could not. Through this exhibition, many people view success as an elusive feature that only a select few can obtain. This theory is the main inspiration for Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration of success in Outliers: The Story of Success. In the book, Gladwell analyzes not only those who are successful, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, J.R. Oppenheimer, and Joe Flom, but what path led them towards becoming exceptionally skilled. This extremely in-depth analysis of successfulness forms Gladwell’s layered theory of what creates success, and his attempt

Success is measured differently by every person and each and every culture. The journey to success in most cultures, however, is generally idealized in the same way: one person working harder than everyone else to achieve his or her goal with their own merits as their only advantage. In Outliers: The Story of Success, the author, Malcolm Gladwell, argues about how wrong that ideology is and the truth behind successful people. Throughout his guide, Gladwell employs the help of many argumentative techniques to convince the reader of his message.

Is it coincidental that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy and many other multi-millionaires were all born within a span of 3 years? Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers, suspects that there is something more behind this occurrence than just a simple coincidence. He asserts that there is no such thing as a self-made man and success does not come from natural talent, rather it comes from extraordinary opportunities and hidden advantages. In Outliers, Gladwell attempts to debunk the myth that people are successful because of themselves, and not because of other factors. Even Malcolm Gladwell acknowledges that passion and hard work are required to succeed. However, he believes that this passion and time to put in the work would not be possible without the aid of extraordinary opportunities. Gladwell prepares a firm set of logical arguments, including the advantages of birth dates, cultural legacy and family backgrounds, to guarantee that his audience will be convinced of his conviction.

Becoming successful is what most people aspire to be. Most people fantasize the dream house, car, and having the dream job. Even though success is viewed so highly, not everyone can be successful. Malcolm Gladwell explains that idea throughout his book Outliers. Gladwell’s chapters contain endless amounts of evidence that support his claims exceptionally well. But, Michiko Kakutani, a critic for New York Times, exposes Gladwell’s evidence as unreliable and unconvincing, and upon further research, Gladwell’s faults grew deeper. Even though Gladwell provides an extensive amount of evidence, that evidence is one-sided and relies on suggestion.

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,

In Malcolm Gladwell's national bestseller "Outliers", Gladwell makes many intriguing assertions, one of them being "If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your imagination, you can shape the world to your desires." This statement is indeed authentic. When one is privileged with extraordinary talent and yet incorporates time and effort to improve it, that person is destined to succeed.

The first chapter of the book Outliers is titled “The Matthew Effect.” Malcolm Gladwell uses this title as a reference to a verse in the bible from the book of Matthew. The verse is basically saying that those who have a lot, will get more and those who don’t have a lot, will get less. Gladwell uses this chapter to show his view on what makes people successful in life. The example he begins with involves young Canadian hockey players.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his novel entitled, “Outliers,” explores the landscape of success and shows us that success comes from the culture that surrounds the successful , not their intelligence and ambition. Gladwell explains this through a series of situations and studies. In Part One, he discusses success as a result of timing, such as the month or year you were born. In Part Two, he focuses on cultural legacies and how they play a role in helping someone become successful. He unfolds the reasons why hockey players are not born in the latter part of the year, why the Beatles and Bill Gates were able to become so successful, and why Jewish immigrants were able to become successful lawyers and doctors. Gladwell disproves many beliefs by discovering

While the author, Malcolm Gladwell, does not dispute that hard work in a necessary component, we learn that many factors, lucky breaks, and some coincidences all occur in making high achievers into true outliers. We also learn that many of the richest, most famous, and most successful people in

Societal success relies on whatever society values most at a point in time. In the current state of society, this value exists as something quite obvious: money. Money carries with it a sense of glamour and achievement. Earning large quantities of money seems achievable, it acts as clear-cut goal that people can point to and shout, “Hey, that’s success!”. Furthermore, personal success does not offer this luxury, and thus evades people to its true meaning. Malcolm Gladwell’s novel, Outliers, demonstrates this principle perfectly. This novel tells the story of “successful” people; however, according to the definition being explored here, it only examines one aspect of success: societal. This book never mentions the man who considers himself a success because of his action figure collection, but it does mention people who have achieved wealth. Software tycoons, extravagant lawyers, and billionaire geniuses fall amongst a plethora of successful people referenced throughout the course of this book, but a man such as Morrie Schwartz never even receives the smallest amount of consideration. This book does not examine how people achieve success; instead, this book examines how people achieve wealth. As a book about success, Outliers demonstrates how integrated society’s definition of success has become in the modern mindset.

Christopher McCandless may be one of the most intriguing characters in nonfiction literature. In Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless gives up all of his worldly possessions in order to move to Alaska and travel alone into the wilderness. Chris seemed to lead a very privileged life, as he came from a fairly well off family. Chris was intelligent, having graduated from Emory University with a degree in anthropology and history. There is much ambiguity as to why Chris suddenly decides to leave his family behind and travel by himself -- although it is clear that Chris’s initial belief was that the best way to live life was alone, surrounded by nature. The overarching question is whether Chris intentionally tried to kill himself when he traveled alone into the heart of Alaska. Those who believe he did contend that he did not make enough of an effort to extract himself from the negative situations in which he found himself. They argue that Chris felt that he was betrayed by his father, and that he tries to kill himself in order to get away from his family as a whole. Yet Chris McCandless did not in fact have a death wish, and his death was the result of his miscalculating how difficult living in the wild would actually be. This resulted from Chris’s excessive pride. His main motivation to go into the wild was to run far away from his family -- who by blinding him, indirectly caused him to miscalculate.

Some may say that you need to have a natural aptitude for something right at the start and that you need to be born an outlier, and so the 10,000 hour rule doesn’t exist. This isn’t true, however. Though it helps be born gifted, practice ends up playing a bigger role than innate talent when concerning a person’s progress. As stated in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, there are no records of naturals (people who succeeded with much talent and little work) or grinds (people who worked hard but did not