The Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

In the novel The Outliers written by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell explains how and why some people succeed with impactful lives and others don’t even if they try their hardest. He looks at the lives of professional hockey players, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and many more people explaining how they’re considered outliers. He explains how some people were deserving of their success, how some weren’t, how some people earned theirs, and how others were just in the right place at the right time. One of the things Gladwell talks about is The Matthew Effect, he talks about how professional Canadian hockey players become successful. According to Malcolm, it takes more than how hard they work or what their lifestyle is to succeed, it mostly depends on factors that they cannot control. For example, Gladwell says that 40% of the players are born between January and March, 30% between April and June, 20% between July and September, and 10% between October and December (23).
This is showing that a child born in January will have a better chance at succeeding in professional hockey than a child born in December, this is because the child in January has more experience with hockey because he’s had more time to play. The children born in January have a higher …show more content…
Gladwell says that if a group of people were given 20 seconds to memorize a certain sequence of numbers that most Chinese people would get the sequence right vs only 50% of Americans getting it correct (227). This is because Chinese numbers are shorter than English numbers, giving Chinese speakers an advantage. For example, 4 is “si” and 7 is “qi”. Also, Asian children normally learn how to count at a younger age so it makes it easier for them to grasp numbers. Asians are considered outliers because just learning their language gives them an advantage over other