Outliers : The Story Of Success Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers: TheStory Of SuccessMalcolm Gladwell Subsection 1: FirstQuarter By: JoseMaria Linares

1. RosetoValfortore: Intro • Town in thefoothills of theItalianApennines. • Exodus of RosetanstoAmerica, ended up near Bangor, Pennsylvania • 1894: 1200 Rosetansappliedfor American Passport • Roseto, Pennsylvania

1. Roseto: Issue • Heartattackepidemic in the US • Leading cause of death in menunder 65 • Stewart Wolf, physician, investigatedRosetoforheartattackdeathrates • Heartdisease in Roseto, 50% of US • No suicide, alcoholism, ordrugaddiction • Rosetowasanoutlier, a place werethe normal rules do notapply.

2. Roseto: Hypotheses • Dietarypractices • FoundoutRosetansstruggledwithobesity (41% of caloriescamefromfat) • Genetics • Trackeddownrelatives of Rosetans, butthesedidnot share theirheatlhycondition • Location • People in Bangor and NazarethhaddeathratesfromHeartDisease 3 times higher.

2. Roseto: Conclusion • “TheRosetanswerehealthybecause of wheretheycamefrom, because of theworldtheyhadcreatedforthemselves in theirtinytown in thehills.” • Understandheartattacks in a new way: lookingbeyondthe individual • Culture he orshewaspart of have a profoundeffect

SecondQuarter

3. Correlation of Intellect and Achievement Through the second quarter of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell supports his argument of success by juxtaposing achievement and intellect. According to him, “by no stretch of the imagination or of standards of genius is the ‘gifted group’ as a whole ‘gifted.’ We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated” (Gladwell 91). He exemplifies such statement with the case of Terman’s ‘Termites’ by demonstrating how these, despite having an IQ above 135, didn’t become successful people. According to Gladwell, the IQ test is an improper measure of success since it doesn’t evaluate a person’s practical intelligence. Therefore, he concludes that after breaking the threshold of a “good enough” IQ, the practical intelligence becomes the tie-breaker.

3. DefiningPracticalIntelligence Besides possessing a high IQ, which is required for achieving high education and knowledge, the EQ (Emotional Quotient) is crucial for a person’s Practical Intelligence. As he defines it, practical intelligence includes: “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for a maximum effect” (Gladwell, 109). Thus, practical intelligence becomes a tool for maximizing the IQ. While IQ is a measure of innate ability, the EQ is acquired knowledge. However, such knowledge is shaped throughout life and here; Gladwell mentions how parenting (during childhood) is essential to the development of Practical Intelligence.

4. Parenting and ItsNature To shape his argument on parenting, Gladwell alludes to a study done by AnneteLareau on such matter. According to Lareau, wealthier parents are heavily involved in their children’s free time, while children in poor families are more independent. She states that for poor children, their play time “wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood” (Gladwell 121). Here, the contrast of wealthy-kids and poor-kids childhoods reflects the eventual development of different personalities. While poor children develop a sense of independence, wealthier ones develop a dominant personality. Meanwhile, middle-class children build up a sense of “entitlement,” as they enjoy the right to pursue individual preferences. As a result, Gladwell concludes that different personalities start to evolve from the moment people are toddlers, until they die with distinguished traits.

4. DifferentChildrenFromDifferentParentingBackground Furthermore, these children evolve to becoming different people, with different ratios of Practical Intelligence. Gladwell suggests that contrasting parenting backgrounds ignite a variety of distinct personalities due to different experiences through childhood. Also, children in different economic classes establish particular relationships with their parents. For example, Gladwell mentions that the working class and poor children were characterized by “an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint. They didn’t know how to get their way or how to customize whatever the environment they were in” (Gladwell 130). On the other hand, wealthier kids establish dominant traits, and are able to shape and blend the different situations presented by their environment. Hence, when these children grow up, only some will develop the “social savvy” skills needed to manage a situation wisely. Even if all of them are gifted with exceptional IQs, intellect is not the only ingredient of success.

ThirdQuarter TheThreeLessons of JoeFlom

5. JoeFlom and hisStory To extend his argument of achieving success, Gladwell uses Joe Flom as a stereotype of a typical outlier in this sense. According to the information provided by Gladwell, the reader depicts Flom as the typical poor boy who struggles to obtain education, but finally ends up graduating from Harvard’s Law School. Even though Flom exemplifies Gladwell’s intentions congruently, the fact that Flom depicts a stereotypical character makes Gladwell’s argument lose credibility and interest. Therefore, since the moment Gladwell mentions Harvard in his example, the reader can imagine the end of the story: he struggles to find a job, and decides to start his own law firm, which later becomes the most important firm in the US. Indeed, that was the case.

5. Lesson Number One Immediately after portraying the typical-success story, Gladwell points out that even though Joe Flom is a stereotypical example of success, the details of his life make him a true outlier, unlike many other successful people. To accomplish this, he contrasts the live of Flom with that of a Jew classmate he had at Harvard Law School: Alexander Bickel. These two shared similar backgrounds since Bickell was also “the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who lived in Brooklyn” (Gladwell 194). Unlike Flom, who went to make his own law firm, Bickell struggled to find a job since he wasn’t from the “right background.” At this point, Gladwell directly points out how Bickell’s cultural and racial background blocked his path towards success, as New York law firms would tend to exclude foreigners as the image of their work. On the other hand, Flom started his firm in the perfect moment to do so. Just like Gates and Jobs did with computers. At the perfect moment.

6. Lesson Number Two For the second lesson, Gladwell compares the success stories of a father and his son: Maurice and Mort Janklow. Both enjoyed a fruitful education and became lawyers; however, their stories were pretty different. Here, Gladwell’s previous argument of timing comes into place. I believe the generational difference between a father and his son might become critical aspects of success. In this case, Maurice (the father) finished college and married just after the Great Depression erupted. Therefore, his prospects of high achievement were economically killed by the Depression. On the other hand, Mort was born in the 1930s: baby boom, later economic boom in the 1970s. Therefore, even though Maurice and Mort might’ve enjoyed very high IQs, and wide spectrum of achievement, Mort is the true outlier. He had something his father lacked: demographic luck.

6. Lesson Number Three Unlike in Colombia, where success comes from wealthy backgrounds (Luis Carlos Sarmiento, the Santo Domingo’s, etc), in New York City it yields from a different background. To illustrate this point, Gladwell exemplifies his argument with the lives of many humble immigrants from different backgrounds who end up producing successful offspring. I can relate this argument to the life of Leo Katz, whose parents migrated to Colombia after the Holocaust and established a ‘Panadería’ in downtown Bogotá. Even though they struggled to keep their business alive and producing, they were able of producing successful offspring. Leo Katz, nowadays, is the owner of Bogotá’s most prestigious line of restaurant. Effectively, his background contributed to his success. In a genetic aspect, his parents gave him that instinct of finding success in a lugubrious landscape.

FourthQuarter Legacy

7. Feuds in the Cumberland Plateau Gladwell starts this new section of Outliers illustrating a violent environment in Harlan, Kentucky. This town, as many other Appalachian towns in the nineteenth century, witnessed an ongoing family feud between its founding families: the Howards and the Turners. According to Gladwell, such feud was a persisting clash that carried on from generation to generation until the early twentieth century. Also, as Gladwell describes it, “at the same time that the Howards and the Turners were killing one another, there were almost identical clashes in other small towns up and down the Appalachians” (Gladwell, 203). But even though we can picture many feuds throughout universal literature, like the Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet, these Appalachian feuds extended to become violent massacres. In this region, the Cumberland Plateau, where the average population oscillated between twelve and fifteen thousand people, there was found over one thousand indictments of murderer due to these feuds. As Gladwell later concludes, this pattern of events tends to happen due to something called culture of honor.

7. Cultures of Honor These cultures of honor, as Gladwell explains us, “tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain” (Gladwell 219). The reason to the birth of this strain lay in the lack of agriculture in these areas (since mountainous territory doesn’t lend itself for farming), which therefore leads to the adoption of herding as a method of economic well being. The culture that develops around being a herdsman differs substantially from that of agriculture. While a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community for his own survival, herdsmen are off by themselves. They have to worry that their livestock might be stolen over night; therefore, they develop an aggressive personality. As a result, we can see how the Appalachian back state of the United States contained so many quarrels throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

8. TheBorderlandCulture The borderlands, developed to be remote and lawless territories that had been fought over since the beginning of their colonization. These were “herdsmen, scraping out a living on a rocky and infertile land. They were clannish, responding to harshness and turmoil of their environment by forming tight family bonds and placing loyalty to blood above all else” (Gladwell 234). However, these people didn’t develop this sense of pertinence and loyalty out of the blue. According to Gladwell, the back country states were settled mainly by one of the most ferocious cultures of honor in the world: the Scotts-Irish. These people, throughout their history, developed a violent perception of the world due to their secluded location. As the Spanish Basque, the Scotts Irish became lawless people steeped in violence. When these settled in the Appalachians, their style of living would inevitably be transmitted to the several herdsmen in the borderlands.

8. TheTriumph of theCultures of Honor Gladwell argues that the development of these cultures of honor throughout the Appalachian borderlands helps to explain why the pattern of criminality in the American South has always been so distinctive. However, homicides in the south aren’t due to crimes of property, or muggings. Instead, as sociologist John Shelton Reed writes (quoted by Gladwell), “the homicides in which the South seems to specialize are those in which someone is being killed by someone he (or often she) knows, for reasons both killer and victim understand” (Gladwell 251). Therefore, violence in these Southern territories didn’t occur for economic gain, but instead, for a personal one. As these cultures of honor in the Cumberland Plateau, people fight over their honor. That was a legacy that the Scotts-Irish culture left to them.

Outliers : The Story Of Success Malcolm Gladwell