In the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell shows patterns of success, and how different people achieve it. An outlier is someone who is an outsider, one who is different from the rest of the people. In this case, Gladwell uses the term outlier as a metaphor for the few successful people in the world. Each chapter teaches the reader a different lesson about success. Timing is important, what is going on in the rest of the world is important, and your background is essential. Being smart does not necessarily give you success. These lessons all teach you that success is an opportunity that doesn’t present itself to everyone, but when it does, you will have to work to be at the top. The ten thousand hour rule, a rule that Gladwell says is common to every success story, is that every successful person has to practice at least 10,000 hours to master something. Outliers is a book that will give you a different perspective on success, and after reading it, you will never take success for granted again.
Gladwell's purpose in the epilogue is to show that he was an outlier and success doesn’t come by will. He puts his own family’s story through the same process he did to those of professional hockey players, Asian math students and Bill Gates. Starting with his great-great-great grandmother, a slave in Jamaica taken by an Irishman named William Ford, Gladwell works down in history to his mother, Joyce Gladwell, a successful writer in Canada, describing the coincidental events that occurred and which ones were needed for the family’s success along the way, like his family’s skin color.
Outliers is about opportunities of success, so this book would be suitable for older teenagers or adults. To get the gist of this book, you would need to understand it by having gone through it, or missing out, like adults would have, or need to have the opportunity to be successful ahead of you. "Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at...