Cuihua Lin
Mr. Hayes
English100
[1:10-2:00]
5/6/13
Word Count: 1258
To be Outliers
How does
one become a successful person? Different people have different perspective. Some people may believe that success
is the result of careful planning, but others may believe that success comes
from taking risks and opportunities. However, I believe that success
is a combination of external factors and personality.
My book club’s text is Outliers: the Story of Success, it tells about what make a person
successful. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, is a journalist for The Washington and writes from a contrarian viewpoint Post, points
out his main points simply and briefly. Gladwell describes why
people are so successful and shares interesting stories about successful people. He shows many examples to help us
to think about some similarities between successful people in order to find out
the key to success. What makes
you succeed? Gladwell argues that there are some circumstantial and environmental factors that
influence a person’s success. He said that External factors play an important role in success. Moreover, Gladwell use
many examples demonstrates his main point, which is that the factors
contributing to a person’s success are beyond the individual’s control, for
he/she is influenced by circumstantial and environmental factors. From Gladwell’s explanations of success, his
book contains the two most important parts: that hard work helps success people
to succeed and that they should seize the opportunities when they occur.
One of the most important parts is that successful people have the
virtue of hard work. Malcolm Gladwell holds that “10,000
hours of working on skills seems to be a rule of success.”( Gladwell 39) I
fully agree with him because only if we work hard, we can reach our dreams. For
instance, Bill Gates could succeed not only because his computer savvy is
better than others, but also because he worked much harder than others. Bill
Gates started working towards the threshold of 10,000 hours when he gained
access to a high school computer. When Gates was in his high school years, he
skipped athletics and spent his whole nights at the Information Sciences Inc.
and the Computer Center Corporation in order to use their computers to program.
Without that hard effort, I believe that Gates could not have had his Microsoft
companies around the world today. What’s more, before they had their first
burst of success, the Beatles, a rock and roll band from England, had performed live in Hamburg,
Germany over 1200 times from 1960 to 1964, which amassed more than 10,000 hours
of playing time. All of the time the Beatles spent in performing shaped their
talents, for “they were no good onstage when they went there and they were very
good when they came back” (Gladwell 50). Everyone wants to succeed, but there
is no shortcut to success. We will succeed only if we work hard. Gladwell’s
conclusion about 10,000 hours teaches readers that only through extremely hard
work and dedication they can make their dreams come true.
In
addition to talk about hard work, seizing the opportunity is very important
because it can lead readers to learn more success. What’s the key to success?
Malcolm Gladwell states that “successful people are often lucky to be in the
right place at the right time.”(Gladwell 123) This quote shows that if those
people did not seize the opportunities, they would never have chances to reach
their goals. For instance, Bill Gates, the computer programming pioneer,
dropped out of Harvard University in order to seize the opportunity to create a
computer company called Microsoft with his friends. Even though Harvard is one
of the most well-known universities around the world, and it could have helped
Bill Gates to live a
good life, Bill Gates gave up his school with great pluck to seize the
opportunity to explore the way of his success. This opportunity allowed Bill
Gates to get to the top of pyramid because that opportunity leads Bill Gates to
get more opportunities. Obviously, seizing the opportunity is crucial for being
successful. If Bill had stayed at the Harvard University until graduation, I
believe Bill Gates would have lost the opportunity to reach his outstanding
status today. Seizing your opportunity makes you go farther than others. It may
be hard to seize it, but we should try our best to catch it and use it to
change ourselves and even change the world. Gladwell’s point tells readers that
once they seize the opportunity, they can succeed more than others with their
hard effort.
While
reading his book outliers, I feel this book is more easy than difficult when I
read because it has fewer difficulty vocabularies. Even though there is few
parts needs a little bit extra time to understand the concepts, most chapters
are easy to understand because it contains some useful factors. For example,
the chart is one of the factors. When Glawell writes about why do most
successful people were born from Jan. to Apr., he not only uses some relevance
datas to prove his claim, but also sets up some tables to help readers easily
to understand what he talks about success. He inserts the charts under the end
of his claims to persuade to readers to believe his claims. Having those
charts, I can easily to read and remember this book. In addition, I think that
charts are useful because I can through the charts to specific know what the
author said. The other factor that I think his book is easy is because he has
similarities points to explain the different success people. From chapter 2,
Gladwell mentions two success people, Bill Gates and Bill Joy, who have some
experience of success. Both of them succeed in the IT field, so I can easily
compare their experience. Even though they have different skills about
computers, they all follow same steps which reach the 10,000 hour rules, and
seize the opportunities. Therefore, as a reader, I could understand the
author’s main points.
Above
all, Gladwell uses some effective evidences to show that his important parts of
success is meaningful, and the text itself is easy to read, which is good for a
transfer level college reading and writing class. I recommend this book to the
future English 100 students because these two reasons: that it can help readers
to learn how to be more successful and that it contains some useful and
interesting knowledge for readers. From two reasons the future English 100
students not only can learn how to work hard or how to seize opportunities to
reach their goals, but also they can easy to understand what this book talks about.
With those meaningful reasons, there is wonder that this book is worth reading
carefully for the future English 100 students.
There
is no doubt that successful people take advantage of opportunities. However, if
we have good condition and environment, but we do not work hard, we can only
watch opportunities pass. Bill Gates and Bill Joy seized the opportunities, but
if they did not work hard, they wouldn’t succeed and become outliers. It is not always innate genius or talent that
will make you
a success; it’s the hours that you put in,
which means that if we work hard now, we could expect success later on. If we
don’t, our future life will probably be gloomy.
Work Cite
And company on November 18, 2008 New York:
Hatchette book group (original work
published 2008).
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