How To Write An Essay On The Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

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ng Mrs. O’Neal AP English Language and Composition – 4 22 March 2016 The Outliers Writing about Reading Defense of Passages Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers explains other people's success by digging deep into their lives and discovering what exactly enabled them to become great. Gladwell utilizes anecdotes from many different people and deductive reasoning to support his claim that success does not come from hard work alone, but rather a combination of personal determination, opportunity, and legacy. The Outliers narrows down success by viewing it as two parts, opportunity and legacy. The author does this by examining those who fall outside of normal statistics. Rather than writing the statistical outliers off as something of another …show more content…

This principle is at the root of every successful person, and is the reason they are able to accomplish all they did. These people who achieved great things such as Bill Gates and Joe Flom were given the opportunity to consistently put time into their craft each day allowing for them to accumulate 10,00. Passage two is also important because it highlights the difference between two geographically similar countries and how the different cultures affect people’s lives. This is significant because it goes against popular belief that you can be anything you want to be, for something that is out of your control shapes your life. Lastly, passage three contrasts with passage two in that society believes that high IQ, an innate ability that is out of one’s control, is the determinant in how successful people will be. However, innate IQ only matters to a point and beyond that there is no significant difference between high IQ people and average IQ …show more content…

He develops his argument by using a personal story about Chris Langan a man with high IQ and statistics about IQ from research to prove innate intelligence doesn’t matter unless you do something with it. For instance, Langan was said to be the next “Einstein” because of his high IQ, but what people didn’t realize however was that “...addi­tional IQ points does not seem to translate into any mea­surable real-world advantage.” Gladwell concludes this from observing the story of Chris Langan and how he “failed” to live up to his potential of being a massive influence on the world. Gladwell proves Langan wasn’t everything he could be be because he was trying to operate on his own “Langan was smart, but he had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever make it

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