The
book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, a
well-known thinker and National Bestselling author, is about how successful
people find their success. In the book, Malcolm Gladwell argues that people are
not successful because they work for it; they are successful because they were
lucky and born in good circumstances. Gladwell aims to flesh out all of the
apparent misconceptions common people have about success. He argues that
success cannot be acquired by just anyone. In the first half of the book, he
essentially tells all of the people looking to be successful, like young
entrepreneurs or young people just entering the work forces or people going
through school, that the “outliers” are not truly outliers at all. He wants to
assure his audience that successful people essentially had help being
successful.
Gladwell uses facts frequently to forward his
theory. When Gladwell argues that phenomenon like relative age affect a
person’s success in the world of sports, he offers tables listing teams of
professional athletes. Gladwell explains that whichever month a sport’s cut off
is in, the best players will have their birthdays close to the cut off because
they were always at a couple-month advantage athletically and developmentally.
Not only does he prove this by listing the roster of the Medicine Hat Tigers,
the best junior hockey team in Canada, but also by listing rosters for the
Czech junior hockey team, and Czech national soccer team. By offering multiple
pieces of evidence, Gladwell is able to appeal to logos, which enhances his
argument. This may also appeal to ethos because his evidence will impress a
reader who tends to respond to logos.
Anecdotes are also a large part of Gladwell’s
argument. He uses anecdotes to illustrate large portions of his subject’s
lives. When Gladwell begins the “10,000-hour rule” chapter, he uses Bill Joy,
legendary computer programmer as an example. Instead of just telling the reader
where Joy grew up and such, Gladwell crafts his life into an interesting snippet.
He writes: “Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the Computer Center
opened. He was sixteen. He was tall, and very thin, with a mop of unruly hair.
He had been voted ‘Most Studious Student’….,which, as he puts it, meant he was
a ‘no-date nerd’” (Gladwell 35-36). Gladwell goes on to tell about how Joy got
lucky with the fact that he was enrolled in the University of Michigan. These
short anecdotes are sprinkled throughout each section, and they help Gladwell
to appeal to pathos, like with the fact that Joy was a ‘no-date nerd’. They
also help to forward his purpose because the anecdotes serve as the context to
many of his arguments. By utilizing both facts and anecdotes, Gladwell achieves his purpose in an intriguing
but believable way.
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