Outliers #1 Claim & Purpose Prologue & Chapter 1 - 2

~ Claim ~ People are considered successful when they express particular traits and characteristics: diligence, self- sacrifice, intelligence, talent. However, Gladwell says that the conditions and circumstances surrounding our lives are the significant influential factors that determine our success, not our inner ability or talent.

~ Purpose ~ To inform reader's on how successful people achieve success through the help of others, practice, and opportunity. To get rid of our society's crude perspective on how outliers become successful.

~ Prologue ~ Malcolm Gladwell begins by giving the definition of the word outlier as a person, situation, or thing that is different from the norm, which is the introductory principle of his book. Gladwell studies people and situations that stand out from the average, and he looks into all of the factors that played a role in creating their success.

~ Chapter 1 ~ Throughout this chapter, Gladwell describes certain advantages sports players and children in school have because of their birth dates. They happened to be born in a beneficial part of the year, and that time of birth led them to have certain advantages that soared upwards from that point on.

~ Chapter 2 ~ Gladwell cites studies and sociologists who claim that for an individual to become an expert in any skill, they need to spend about 10,000 hours practicing or working on it before making it big. Gladwell makes the point that to get 10,000 hours of practice, which usually takes a decade, you need a lot of luck and extraordinary circumstances.

Chandler Mumper Reference: of-successhttp:// of-success