Outliers Book Report

Unfolding over a total of nine chapters in two components, in additament to a prologue and epilogue, Outliers commences with a visual examination of outliers, defined by Gladwell as extraordinary people who are on the far reaches of achievement and defy the odds. The book commences by observing that a disproportionate number of elite Canadian hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year. Because youth hockey leagues determine eligibility by calendar year, the older kids are more immensely colossal and more vigorous, and as such are favored by coaches. This is a phenomenon that Gladwell describes as “accumulative advantage”, where an early edge snowballs into a more sizably voluminous and more astronomically immense advantage. …show more content…
He contrasts the story of Christopher Langan, a man with a 195 IQ that outstripped even Einstein’s but never achieves much prosperity due to a dysfunctional upbringing, with the story of nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer. In contrast to the working-class Langan, Oppenheimer grew up in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Incipient York and had prosperous parents who provided him the best edification. That sanctioned him to thoroughly capitalize on his innate faculties and elevate to incredible highs in the scientific world. His privilege even sanctioned him to elude expulsion in college at one point. Expanding on this theme, Gladwell explores the concept that the prosperity of students in different cultures or different socioeconomic backgrounds is highly cognate to how much exposure the students have to scholastic opportunities. He optically canvasses the Erudition is Power Program, which fixates on inner-city students and provides them with enrichment opportunities, as well as a study that shows that aestival vacation has a disproportionately negative impact on students from disadvantaged backgrounds, due to the lack of enrichment opportunities during the months off from