Malcom Gladwell's necessities for success

    What do you need to succeed in life? This is a popular question – I mean who doesn’t want to succeed in life – with a variety of answers: Hard work, communication skills, a positive attitude, and much more. However, what if you were told that there were two things that were more important which could lead you to success: Opportunity and cultural legacies. Although this sounds way too simple, Outliers: The Story of Success written by Malcolm Gladwell, shows how this is true by looking at the case for some of the most successful people, including Bill Gates, the Beatles, and Mozart. This book also looks at data sets and experiments conducted to make these points stronger.

  The first section of the book focuses on opportunities; how successful people in the past and present had opportunities that they did not create themselves, which had greatly benefited them. Each chapter in the section looks at something different that allows these people to gain opportunities, such as when they were born (not just the year but also the month). My favorite chapter in this section was on an experiment conducted by Lewis Terman, who created the Stanford-Binet IQ test, where he gathered approximately 1500 students with the highest IQ and tracked them as they grew up. His hypothesis was that these high IQ students (which he strangely called the “Termites”) would have successful careers and even win the Nobel Prize. Although some of them did have great careers, others had careers that even he thought were not successful and none of them won the Nobel Prize. In fact, two students he had cut off because their IQ wasn’t “high enough” had won the Nobel prize. His conclusion was that “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated” (Gladwell, Chap. 3 Sec. 5).

    The second section of the book focuses on cultural legacies; how people behave based on their ancestors. The section starts off like a mystery novel with a case in the 1800s where a southerner, Wix Howard, killed a man after being accused of cheating in a game of poker. However, very surprisingly, Howard was ruled innocent by the jury (in fact only one jury had said guilty) as the culture said, “that murder – under those circumstances – was not a crime” (Gladwell, Chap 6. Sec. 2) Additionally, in the early 1990s, two psychologists conducted an experiment which saw that insulting and provoking a southerner would be much more dangerous than a northerner (now of course this isn’t saying that all ­southerners get angry easily). This experiment saw that the behavior of the southerners were carried on from their ancestors. I found this section very interesting as cultural legacies are something that are not controllable (you are born into the cultural legacy), which would potentially impact your success.

    In conclusion, Outliers: The Story of Success is a book which presents experiments and data to show how important opportunities and cultural legacies are to a person’s success. Now this obviously doesn’t mean things like practice and hard work are not important, it’s just that the opportunities and cultural legacies gift chances for more practice and work, which lead to a better chance of success. This is a great book to read in your free time as it has a mixture of stories and information, and will help with boredom.

P.S: The answer to the IQ test was A but I still don't understand it. Please tell me if you figure it out

-        - Yuto. I

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