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Malcom Gladwell's Outliers Essay

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Malcom Gladwell's Outliers Essay
In the second chapter of his book, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell writes to his readers about the importance of repetitions. In this chapter, Gladwell expresses and gives examples of the importance of repetitions. In order for one to become an expert or excel in something, one must repeat this action for at least 10,000 hours. Gladwell’s first example of the 10,000-hour rule is Bill Joy, a sixteen-year-old boy. He was interested in computer programming, which was a hard thing to learn about in 1970’s. Computers were hard to come by and they were giant machines that filled up an entire room with their equipment. Bill Joy went to college, not pursing an education in computer sciences, he was interested in math and engineering. He ended up getting …show more content…
Gladwell mentions Bill Gates and how he was given so many opportunities to put in long hours for him to eventually create his company, Microsoft. There were so many factors that led him up to becoming a successful man, like his education or his location. There are a few others that Gladwell writes about, like Steve Jobs, yet his focus is on the amount of time that the individual puts into his or her work or even the opportunities. Gladwell then gives example of the richest people in the world, fourteen out of seventy-five names are from the United States, born in the nineteenth century. This is because this is when America’s economy went through a great period of transformation. Malcom mentions things like Wall Street or the railroads were being built during this period and many people benefited from that. Just like the nineteenth century, 1975 was a perfect year for a young person to excel with computers. It was at that time where computer technology was being advanced and they needed the right people to advance the programs, Bill Gates and Bill Joy were some of those people. They were born in the right time period and had put in the hours to understand and excel at what they were to do. Gladwell finally comments, “These are stories, instead about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a

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