A Critical Analysis Of Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Success is something that nearly all people aim for over the course of their lives. The pinnacle of someone's life is looked at by whether they were successful in life. Success is redefined by each person who seeks to achieve it and there is not one set definition to measure how successful a person is. In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell attempts to define and justify success based on people who are considered successful in the eyes of nearly everyone. Gladwell proposes his theory on why certain people have become successful like Bill Gates, the Beatles, and Joe Flom as well as discussing the overall success of certain groups such as Canadian hockey players and Asian academic students. The idea that success is not only the product of how
Gladwell stressed the importance of social conditions on ones success which is a key factor in success, and he supports this idea though his stories, where social status or lack thereof made a difference in the success of the person. For example, Joe Flom, a successful lawyer, was born to Jewish immigrants who made a living in the garment industry, while Bill Gates of Microsoft was born into a wealthy family with his father being a lawyer (Gladwell, 2011). Both Flom and Gates are successful because of where they came from. Gates was brilliant, but his mother was wealthy enough to fund the computer program at his school and Flom learned the true meaning of hard work from his parents (Gladwell,
Ben Carson is currently known as the pediatric neurosurgeon that is running as a Republican candidate in the 2016 Presidential election, but how did he come to this point? Dr. Carson is the product of a success story back by hard work and dedication. Benjamin Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan in September of 1951 to Sonya Carson, who had dropped out of school and got married at the age of 13. At the age of eight, Carson's parents divorced, which left his mother to raise him and his older brother on her own. It was not an easy life for Carson and his brother and in the fifth grade their mother made a change in the boy's lives for the better. As Carson was at the bottom of his class and starting to become violent after getting bullied, Sonya made her boys take extra time to read and do homework outside of school before playing. This built a longing to learn and a want to be successful in Carson at a young age, which led Carson to graduate high school with honors, attend Yale followed by Medical School at the University of Michigan ("Benjamin Carson Biography --Academy of Achievement,"