Outliers Malcolm Gladwell Essay

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In Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell introduces the idea of success and what people typically believe to be successful. Typically people become successful due to his or her own individual skill and how he or she uses the skill. Gladwell claims that people do not have talent or a skill just by doing things on their own, they have many things that support him or her on the journey to success. He gives an example of an elite youth hockey team. They are all born in the earlier months of the year. This is due to the cut off date of the season and leads to many other factors of why the player are chosen. Older children have stronger bodies, so their performance is significantly better than the younger players. So scouts take the older players and put them on better team with all the necessities to improve themselves. This also applies to the school system as well. Successful people were not outliers in the beginning they were slightly better than the others and people took that talent and nurtured it. …show more content…
Through this process some people who could also be talented are squandered. He claims that people hold dear to the idea of success being “simple function of individual merit”. He gives the idea of putting children in groups by their birth month for competition to people closer to their age. He believes success is created from hard work and opportunity. In America, the word success and intelligence are tied together, but this isn’t completely true. He show that intelligence isn’t always better with an experiment of creativity. The children with the higher IQs came up with less ideas of what they could do with a sheet and a brick that the children with lower IQs. Childhood cultivate the child’s success because what they learn from their families helps them in the future. A child with less parental contact would be less likely to learn skill to help them preserve in the future. Gladwell brings up the idea of cultural identity being a factor of a person’s success rate. Many successful people were in born in a time that helped their skill improve and set into action. Where a person starts out is a big part of what makes them successful in the future. There are many other factors that the individuals couldn’t control that helped with the individual’s success. Gladwell presents an idea of how our past is an important part of our lives. He moves the topic to airplanes and how flights go well or poorly. They based on one factor, the communication of the crew. He relates this to how people communicate to the cultures they are from. Our pasts affect how we behave and relate to the world around us. He brings the topic to China and their education system that makes it easier for youth to understand math. He also talks about the determination of rice farmer and how much they work. He combines the ideas together that asian students are more intelligent due to their perseverance to learn math. In America’s legacies we have a belief that after work we get rest, while in China after work you get a reward. He argues that summer vacations is too long so children in lower income families can’t be productive. He explains the idea of sacrifice, some may have to sacrifice things to become successful. Mainly he shows

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