The Outliers

In the year 1984, a young man named Malcolm Gladwell graduated at the University of Toronto, he then moved on to the United States of America to become a journalist. In the past couple of years this young man has came out with three very popular books such as Outliers: “The Story of Success.” In this book he mentions many stories about successful people and how they were in the right place at the right time.

To start off Gladwell mentions all of these hockey players who get an advantage at becoming professional because of their birthdays. Gladwell mentioned that “success in hockey is based on individual merit- and both of those words are important.” He means that players are judged on their performance and talent, not their team’s performance. Gladwell uncovers the remarkable secrets about professional hockey and tells us all. In this section of the book he shows us that more than half of the players, in all of the Canadian teams in 2007, have birthdays in the beginning of the year, starting with January to March. The scouts for Canadian hockey teams consider all of these men over the others not because they just like thoes months, but because thewse men are older. Gladwell also mentions “yes, hockey players who make it to the professional level are more talented than you or me. But they also got big head start, an opportunity that they neither deserved nor earned.” For example lets take Scott Watsen, he is in the professional leagues. He played on a hockey team in Canada and took his team all the way to the Memorial Cup Championship. Watsen’s was born on January 4, which is the perfect day for a hockey player to have his birthday. Gladwell suggested that if his birthday were later into the year he probably would not have gone professional. I mean not all hockey players born in January will become professional but all the ones with talent will.

Billy Joy, at age 16, became one of the many “gawky” students who pass through Computer Science programs in college. Joy came to the University of Michigan the year they got computer science into their majors. After he graduated he got a job with his professor and programmed many things over the summer. Joy then enrolled himself at Berkeley, California; he then majored in computer software. Then after that he found a job at UNIX, which was successful computer software developed by AT&T. Joy’s software was so good that it became the operating system for a million of computers around the entire world. Billy Joy’s story has been told many times, and the same message comes out every time. Success doesn’t come from who your parents or you grandparents are, it doesn’t come from how much money you family has. Success comes from you talent and where you are at the time. If Billy had not gone to Berkeley he would have never created this program. Also if he didn’t decide to take the summer job withy his professor he would have never again created this brilliant software.

Outliers by Malcom Gladwell is an excellent book about the most successful people in the world, and how they became successful by being in the right place at the right time. These two stories I summarized are about people being in the right place at the right time. For example the first story was about the Canadian Hockey League. 90% of these men have birthdays from January to March. Canadian scouts do this because all if these men have had a head start. They all have the best talent and are all-older then the other men born in any moth after March. Along with hockey Gladwell also mentions that many soccer league scouts do the exact same thing. They choose all of the men born in January to March. This roster shown in the book shows that 16 out of 21 people are born in the beginning of the year. But the rest are all in April or May.