Outliers – the Story of Success - Book Report

Megan Miller

Instructor Wolff        

Soc 1000.500

05 December 2014

Outliers – The Story of Success

        In the book, The Outliers – The Story of Success, written by Malcolm Gladwell, studies the aspects that contribute to success.  I believe Malcolm’s purpose in writing this book was to show the many different ways success can be achieved.  Success is not just handed to you, but in a sense, if you are in the right place at the right time it actually is.  Success can be obtained by the help of other people, practicing what you may be good at, and by having the opportunities that others may not have.  These are a couple of the themes in this book.

        This book was a great example of how people become successful.  It did not only show why people became successful, but it showed how they became successful.  Malcolm Gladwell did this by researching successful peoples past, and culture and wrote about how those factored into them becoming successful instead of just assuming.  Gender is a major sociological idea present in this book.  A lot of the success stories that Gladwell wrote about were how men became successful.  A Gender Role is expectations regarding the proper behavior, attitudes, and activities of males and females.  Traditionally, the world thinks of men as the breadwinner, and the women as the “stay at home mom” or maybe she will work, but will never bring home as much money as the man in the house.  That is how the world is; everyone assumes things, unlike Malcolm Caldwell who actually does research to find out about a person.  Another sociological idea in this book is the socialization aspect.  Socialization is the lifelong process in which people learn the attitudes, values, and behaviors appropriate for members of a particular culture.  For example, in Bill Gates’ culture, he was raised to be a good kid that came from a wealthy family with a good attitude.  He was a lucky kid because he grew up in the 1950’s when computers were very rare and scarce, but his private school had computers that the kids were able to use.  This is what heightened the chances of Bill Gates’ being such a successful man.  He had the opportunity and he took it.  He was also given the time to practice and become very good at using computers, so much to become the founder of Microsoft.