Outliers

In the non-fiction book, Outliers: The Story of Success, the author, Malcolm Gladwell, takes a look at how a person’s environment with a personal drive and motivation can affect his or her possibility and opportunity for success. To understand their success, we need to look at their opportunities, their birthplace, and even their birthday. Those are the three strong points in Gladwell’s overall “argument” in The Outliers.

Gladwell takes a look at a lot of modern known individuals that have become in Gladwell’s eyes “successful”. The birthdate seems to be a really big opportunity that an individual can receive. For example, Gladwell looked at Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates and how he became what he is today. Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955. Gates was able to take advantage of the small knowledge that people had about technology at the time and create his success. All of this was because of the time period that Gates was born in.

Some of the ways that a number of Canadian hockey players were successful was because they were born in the first few months of the calendar year. The children born on January 1 play along with the children that work born on December 31 in the same year. For the children that are born in the earlier year, they are bigger and more mature than the other children on the same league. The older children are considered a better athlete which leads to extra coaching and a better chance for the child of becoming an elite hockey player.

One person that Gladwell looked at that didn’t seem to have an opportunity in life was a man named Christopher Langan. He was a man that had a higher IQ than the legendary Einstein. Despite Langan having an IQ of 195, he ended up owning a horse farm in Missouri and not able to use his abilities because of the environment in which he grew up. No one in his life gave him an opportunity in life to achieve the success that everyone has made.

Gladwell looked at what was needed for a person to succeed in...