Malcolm Gladwell Outliers

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“Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage.’” In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success (Outliers), he coherently argues that many mass assumptions about success do not hold up to scrutiny. Before Gladwell can argue that many of the assumptions held by the public are false, he has to show that there are general assumptions held by the public. Malcolm Gladwell exposes these assumptions about success through articulate storytelling. He begins the first chapter of Outliers by telling the story of a young canadian hockey player and his rise to success through the canadian hockey meritocracy. In the story, Gladwell stresses the idea that this player succeeded through hard work devotion to his …show more content…
Since counterexamples, or more specifically, counterstories suit Gladwell’s persuasive style of write well, he uses them often and executes them flawlessly. An example of a persuasive counterstory Gladwell uses is his retelling of the life of Chris Langan. Chris Langan was born a genius. He was able to speak by the time he was six months old. His IQ is between 195 and 210, at least thirty percent higher than Einstein's. So it would seem, Gladwell argues, that due to Langan’s innate ability, he would be successful. But he is not. Chris Langan is not flipping burgers at Mcdonalds, but he is not successful in the way we would consider success. With an IQ like his, it would seem like he should be a billionaire, or at least a multimillionaire, but he is neither of these. In fact, he lives with his family on a horse farm in Missouri where he works on his Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe. Through stories like this, Malcolm Gladwell shows that many assumptions about successful people and how they became successful are not true.
Throughout Outliers, Gladwell cogently breaks down many assumptions about success and shows how they are mistaken, but the book does have its limitations. Gladwell occasionally infers general causality about a subject from too few instances. His data is spot on, but he sometimes gets
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