The Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell Essay

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Book Report of
The Outliers
By: Malcolm Gladwell

The Outliers starts in a small town of pensylvania known as rossetto. The town was named after a small Italian village. 1The people of Roseto have an extremely low rate of heart disease although there has been a huge heart disease epidemic in the 1950’s. “no one under 55 had died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease” Curious about this small town’s health, Stewart Wolfe, with the help of colleagues, collected death records and family genealogies to investigate the amazingly low heart rate of this town. Expecting to find a special diet or genes that caused the astonishing health benefit, Wolfe was surprised to see that the reason for the lowered risk of heart disease was the social structure of the town, and their origins of Roseto Valefotore,Italy. “The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.” Many house-holds had three generations living in the same home. This town that overcame the ‘norms’ was an outlier. A great start to this life changing book

One of the numerous names mentioned in The Outliers, is Roger Barnsley. He was at a hockey game when he noticed that there was an amazing amount of hockey players born in the first few months of the year. As shown in the chart on page 20-21. The reason behind this is that the cut-off age for age-class hockey programs is January 1st. So kids born around the first few months can be many months older than the other player sometimes almost an entire years difference. This extra bit of experience at a young age draws the eyes of rep squads “And what happens when a player gets chosen for a rep squad? He gets better vouching… he plays fifty or seventy five games a season instead of twenty like those [younger players] left behind in the ‘house’ league.” Gladwell then begins to talk about the 10,000 hour rule and highly successful people that he finds had opportunities practically handed to them very early on in life that helped them gain enormous amounts of experience.
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For example, in middle school, Bill Gates was allowed access to computers when around his childhood, computers were only owned by large schools and corporations. Another great example shown in the outliers is The Beatles; they were hired to play in Hamburg clubs giving them copious amounts of time to practice “they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times” so they could go from a “struggling high school band” before they could even begin seeing their success which came in 1964. Lewis Terman was another one of Gladwell's examples of discovering outliers. He Came up with the idea that IQ was extremely important and wa highly correlated to achievement in life. He interviewed 1500 kids with extraordinary IQ’s, “The Termites” as the kids were called. Terma suggested that these kids would excel in life, have the best jobs, and become outliers. However, as Terman later discovered, high intelligence does not necessarily guarantee success. Many of the termites did very well but that did not prove that a high IQ directly correlates with successfulness. It was found that our origins have an enormous impact on

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