Outliers Persuasion

In our world today, we place a lot of emphasis on innate intelligence and high IQ. However, in his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell challenges our mythical idea of success. He argues that “the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point”, and that other factors can play a greater role. I agree with Gladwell’s argument that IQ alone does not determine an individual’s success because I believe that qualities like economic status, work ethic, and mindset can be equally, or even more, important. I also believe that it is important that we move away from our old ideas of success because they cripple many aspects of our society, most notably our education system. One of the first people to do significant research on the …show more content…
An individual’s mindset and work ethic can also play a very large role. In her book, Mindset, Carol Dweck presents and analyzes two distinct mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that their qualities are “carved in stone,” while people with a growth mindset believe that they can cultivate their qualities through hard work and effort. Dweck argues that the fixed mindset limits achievement, and therefore success, while the growth mindset encourages it. This means that in order to be successful, it is best to believe that you can improve, and to work hard and put a lot of effort into doing so. It also suggests that mindset is more important to success than IQ, and reinforces the idea that hard work is absolutely necessary for success. Thus, economic status, mindset, and work ethic are all factors that are more important to consider in successful people than …show more content…
Our current gifted education programs reinforce the fixed mindset by suggesting that certain students are simply smart and others are not. This system is based on the idea that IQ is the only predictor of intelligence and potential, and as I have shown in the above paragraphs, this is not true. In his article, “Gifted and Talented Programs Dumb Down Our Students”, Matthew Mugo Fields argues that “we need to think about ‘gifted and talented’ as the goal, not the starting point.” I believe that gifted programs are valuable, but they need to be reworked to reward hard work and continual improvement. Students should be chosen because they work hard and need more opportunities to “cultivate their natural abilities”, not because they have a certain IQ score. In this way, students will be rewarded for things other than IQ and will be able to improve their natural skills, eventually becoming more successful in the long