My Journey to Success Everyone has their own opinion of success. If a person were to ask a group of people what they thought made a person successful, they may say hard work, or that they were merely born into a situation, or an advantage that gave you an easy path to success. Although both may be true, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers, shows us all the circumstances that contribute to our success. These factors or circumstances include the time period in which you are born, the place you were born, culture, community, hard work, and your family. Through this essay I will be using Gladwell’s factors of success to analyze my life and the path it took me to get to West Liberty University. My path to West Liberty University started on
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Gladwell (2008) himself writes, “But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities” (p.55). My parents and sister were always there to encourage and teach me, they were my extraordinary opportunity. My mother was a stay at home mom for the first eight years of my life. Every day she was there to work with me and teach me new things. In those first five years of my life I was able to learn so much. When I went to elementary school, I was one of the brightest kids in all my classes. I knew things like my numbers, alphabet, how to read and write. These were things that many of the children in my class simply did not know how to do. My mother, being there for me every day, contributed to my success, giving me an advantage over the other children my age. I also have an older sister who liked to help me with my school work and teach me new things that she was learning in her classes. This helped me in knowing some of the material of the classes before even stepping foot in them. This put me even further ahead in school and greatly contributed to my academic success. Gladwell wrote the award-winning book Outliers, that focused on success and the ways people obtained success. In this book, Gladwell (2008) made a claim that, “their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up” (p. 67). This quote applies to me in that my success was not all my own making. My family pushed me and made me who I am by the opportunities they gave me. Given different circumstances, I could have been just like those other kids in my class that were slowly falling
Gladwell (2008) himself writes, “But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities” (p.55). My parents and sister were always there to encourage and teach me, they were my extraordinary opportunity. My mother was a stay at home mom for the first eight years of my life. Every day she was there to work with me and teach me new things. In those first five years of my life I was able to learn so much. When I went to elementary school, I was one of the brightest kids in all my classes. I knew things like my numbers, alphabet, how to read and write. These were things that many of the children in my class simply did not know how to do. My mother, being there for me every day, contributed to my success, giving me an advantage over the other children my age. I also have an older sister who liked to help me with my school work and teach me new things that she was learning in her classes. This helped me in knowing some of the material of the classes before even stepping foot in them. This put me even further ahead in school and greatly contributed to my academic success. Gladwell wrote the award-winning book Outliers, that focused on success and the ways people obtained success. In this book, Gladwell (2008) made a claim that, “their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up” (p. 67). This quote applies to me in that my success was not all my own making. My family pushed me and made me who I am by the opportunities they gave me. Given different circumstances, I could have been just like those other kids in my class that were slowly falling