Outliers

Author’s Viewpoint

Malcolm Gladwell wrote, Outliers in 2008. The author’s aim was to write and inform readers on how the concept of someone being called a genius was over-rated. Gladwell argued that success had a lot to do with opportunity, which is being in the right place and the right time. This coupled with factors such as significant hard work; over 10,000 hours to gain mastery, and cultural legacy play huge roles in success. Gladwell examines what made some individuals remarkably more successful than others. These "outliers," as he tagged them, are commonly thought to possess skills, talent and intelligence far above that of the average person, like the Great Man Theory. Gladwell challenged this belief by looking at the background of some of the most famous outliers.

Author’s purpose

The author’s purpose was to write about a variety of “alternative reasons” for success. Gladwell stated that random factors like chance, when and where a person was born did impact the opportunities in life. Gladwell narrowed the alternative reasons for success to opportunity and legacy. Gladwell introduced the factor of opportunity by taking the Canadian hockey league and finding a strong correlation between players who were born almost a full year earlier than their peers. Gladwell showed that players born in the first few months of the year were more successful than those who were born later. The players who were older were give an opportunity to join developmental teams and had the opportunity to practice more. More practice led to more success, it’s was not necessarily that those players were more talented than the others, they just received more opportunity to train and therefore developed better skills. Gladwell observed the 10,000-Hour Rule which overall concluded that individuals who had the opportunity to practice more than 10,000 hours end up mastering their craft. Gladwell used the example of the Beatles, who played over 10,000 hours, in Hamburg in order to...