Malcolm Gladwell and His Understanding of an Outlier - Assignment Example

MALCOLM GLADWELL After rejection from all the advertising agencies he applied to, Malcolm, a young graduate from University of Toronto moved to US in 1984 to start his career as a journalist. Gladwell’s grades were not at all good in the graduate school and no one knew he would become the bestselling author and speaker. His is a recommended author in many business schools. Gladwell’s eyes are thematic microscopes which unlike naked eyes tease out invisible connections. He has the ability to scrutinize the unluckiest relationships across conventional categories of disparate topics. He is a sports lover and has an attitude inclined towards psychology and research. In his literature psychological and sociological issues are delved deeper by the use of sports at all levels. Gladwell said; "Im not sure that the boundaries that used to exist among different recreational activities will matter as much in the future." Gladwell is the writer of four books, all successful. He described his brainwave of writing as; "I have two parallel things Im interested in. One is, Im interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is Im interested in collecting interesting research. What Im looking for is cases where they overlap." The Tipping Point gives a new way to understand world, Blink changed the view of thinking and Outliers transformed the understanding of success. He really is a gifted man with the ability to see beyond those simplicities which others ignore. OUTLIERS, AN OVERVIEW Outlier is a statistical term which is used to define points which do not follow the trend. Literally an outlier is the odd one out, the different, the status quo breaker, the one who brazen out the routine and the one who has the ability to challenge the norms. The book “Outliers” is itself an out of the box idea of Gladwell. Like his previous books, Gladwell, in Outliers has followed his tradition of challenging the status quo. The name itself has embark an extremely different and entirely new definition of the term; “Outliers”. After reading “Blink” the initial two seconds spent on looking the book comprised of the name; “Outliers”. My very first opinion influence through the name of the book was that it will be a powerful piece of literature. To me the hypothesis is successful, decisions made in mere two seconds are as good as the decisions made cautiously and deliberately. The book; “Outliers” is as powerful as the name itself suggests. Gladwell has used the term “Outlier” to represent the successful people of the world. He talks of those who have achieved a lot in their lives, the ones who are considered to be the most intelligent and talented. The book revolves around the successful and the reasons of their success. The content may look ancient and shabby as there are millions of books that already exist on the topic of success, but what makes “Outlier” an OUTLIER is Gladwell’s personality which is the hybrid of psychology and research. Understanding the psyche of nature and researching the incidents to support the hypothesis made him potent enough to canvass a recipe of success which has ingredients that were never known or figured out before. The divergent ingredient of success pinpointed by Gladwell is the; “10000 hours rule”. A new and entirely distinct ingredient which was never earlier noticed or expressed by anyone. The quest to know, why so many really smart and really ambitious people in his surrounding not worth 60 billion Dollars, urged Gladwell to write “Outliers”. Gladwell said; "It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude, and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations." Achievement is the product of talent and preparation, a former equation of success, is confronted by Gladwell. He did not accept talent and preparation alone as the factors that determine success. Gadwell believes that a person’s environment in conjunction with talent, motivation and preparation affects the possibility of success. Finding and tapping the right opportunities in the right frame of time has a significant impact on a person’s success. No matter how potential a candidate is if he didn’t find that one chance he would never be able to prove his self. The book is the mere collection of those overlooked facts which play an important role in making one successful and other not. It contains those opportunities which the successful get and the unsuccessful remain deprived of. It discusses the factor of “luck” as an ingredient of success recipe and above all it tells the importance heritage and inheritance possess in driving ones success. The book is divided in to two parts; opportunity and legacy. OPPORTUNITY Outliers are those who are beyond the normal understanding of achievement. They are exceptional, smart, rich and successful and remain at the outer edge of what is conceived as statistically and socially plausible. The opportunity part comprising of five chapters focus on that it is not important what within a person makes him successful. The important are those nitty gritties which lie outside the person making him successful. He has used the examples of people with exemplary achievements like; Beatles and Billgates with the focus on their “nurturing rather than nature”. He identified that wild stream of opportunities these people got in their lives. He put the list of the richest people of the world. He highlighted the fact that most of them belong to US and have born between 1930 and 1940. The reason he mentioned as the main source of their success is the transformation American economy went through during 1960s and 1970s. It was this period when roads and railways were built, industrial and manufacturing sector was at boom and Wall Street emerged. And thus it is important how old people were when this wild stream of opportunities strikes US. People born in the mid of 19th century were the ultimate beneficiaries of this flare of opportunities and thus who so ever tapped the opportunity increases his or her probability of becoming successful. People born before the ten year bracket were old and conservative to cope with the transition and people born after that period were young and infantile to avail it. LEGACY The second part, Legacy, is comprised of four chapters in which Gladwell discusses family, culture and friendships as an important factors that determine success. Steve Jobs, unlike Bill Gates who belonged to a rich family, grew in the Mountain View, epicenter of Silicon Valley. Engineers from Hewlett Packard were his neighbors. He spent his teenage in prowling the streets of Mountain View where the big headed Engineers and electronic hobbyists and thinkers use to sale the spare parts, exploited the innate passion of Steve Jobs. It was this surrounding which polished his skills and transform him in to the pioneer of software revolution. As put in author’s words; it’s like you want to become a fashion designer and you happen to share your neighborhood with Giorgio Armani. 10000 HOURS RULE The most interesting part of the book that remains the heart throughout the publication is the 10000 hours rule. The idea is; a person needs ten thousand hours of practice to become really great or perfect in something. Bill Gate was sent at Lakeside when he was 13 years old where he got the “chance” to use time sharing terminal in 1968 which was impossible to conceive in any other part of the world, later the C-Cubed required people to check its codes on weekends was another “chance” he got. He then got a “chance” to work on the payroll software of ISI. Followed was the “coincidence” that he lived at a walking distance from University of Washington that allowed free computer time between 3 to 6 in the morning. If all these incidences are summed up they form an accumulative advantage for Bill Gates. He spent more than 10000 hours of his life that extinguished his passion and transform him in to an outlier. CONCLUSION With all his research and findings, Gladwell sums up his understanding of an “outlier” in the final page of his book itself as; Outliers are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all. REFERENCES Gladwell. 2008. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company Read More