What is an outlier? As Malcolm Gladwell explains in his novel Outliers: The Story of Success, an outlier is “something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body”. A man named Lawrence Edward Page, with a mind like no other teams up with another man named Sergey Brin to create the famously known search engine, Google. In the book Outliers, Gladwell mentions many strategies and methods to achieve success. While a few apply to Larry, many of them do not. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, is one of the best demonstrators of Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of success through the 10,000 Hour Rule and his theory based on backgrounds. Larry Page has had many factors that lead him to his success in life and …show more content…
Born and raised in Michigan, he was born on March 26th, 1973 in East Lansing. Growing up both Larry’s parents were experts in computers and taught as professors at the University of Michigan. With this being said it was no surprise that Larry had an interest in this career field. He graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991 and continued on to earn a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan. Later on, he enrolled at Stanford University to obtain his Master of Science in computer science. He’s had this interest of starting his own company since the age of 12. His childhood was full of computers and tech magazines of all sorts and that potentially increased his fascination for technology at such an early age. His brilliance seemed to blossom during his time at Stanford. After he entered the Ph.D. program, he had a decision to make. This is when the idea of linking web browsers together, a lot like a citation link to a reference. With this plan, he teamed up with Ph.D. student Sergey Brin, who thought this topic was very interesting. This project’s name started off as ‘Backrub’. Both starting on this huge task to create a crawler that would convert backlink data to a list of the importance of the web page. The first official …show more content…
This being one of Gladwell’s prevailing rules of taking the time to master something by practicing it for 10,000 hours. At 40 hours a week, to reach the 10,000 hours it would roughly take 5 years of practice every week. At a very young age Larry was introduced to computers and by the age of six, he began to learn how to take apart devices and started to question his parents about all different kinds of electronics. Being more advanced in technology, in elementary school he was the first student to submit an assignment using a word processor. While working towards earning his Ph.D. at Stanford University, Larry worked hard to gain more knowledge about computer science and programming. He’s had many hours of practice with computers by this age and is already more advanced for his age. With being born into an intelligent family, he had many opportunities to advance his intelligence by the help of his parents. One of the cases Gladwell explains in Outliers is of Bill Gates, which has many similarities to Larry Page. Gates was born into a wealthier family and also went to the few colleges that offered coding programs. The University of Michigan opened their new Computer Center in 1971, around the same time Bill Gates attended this school where he got 24/7 access and racked up his hours of experience at such a young age. Microsoft then was the by-product of his mastery of programming. He was