Harnessing Success: Malcolm Gladwell's Insights into Opportunities and Cultural Legacies

An outlier refers to something different from the rest. It is a title of Malcolm Gladwell’s non-fiction book. It became the best-selling book thanks to its great influence and inspiration about achieving success. It is a book that explores human characteristics as factors of the society. It also explores how success is not only limited to personal strength but to opportunities that are present in an individual.  As a non-fiction Malcolm provides his truth about success based on his own perceptions, research, and understanding that he has gathered for many years. Malcolm explores some of the reasons that lead to great levels of success. He examines the lives of some of the most successful people in the world such as Bill Gates, celebrities and sports men and explores how various aspects of their lives led to their successful lives. The book was positively received by critics and readers and felt too many as an autobiography of Malcolm because of drawing on personal experiences and perception. It is also considered as one of his most personal writings. Cultural as well as forces in the society play a major role in the development of success in people. However, for many years people have forgotten personal attributes as factors of success. The ability to capitalize on opportunities as well as maximize use of time provides great opportunities to individuals to have success. The analogy of being self-made has also been used for a long time. However, it only works effectively when an individual is well capable of utilizing the advantages that exist around them. Not everyone is well bestowed with opportunities and people with the same capacities may have different outcomes of success, and this depends on the opportunities that surround them as well as their abilities to utilize these opportunities.

The ability of people to quickly make sense of the world around them and use the information provided to them by the society and culture becomes a great incentive for their success. Malcolm describes outliers as people who are extra ordinary. They are people with great abilities in specialization and use collaboration to learn and develop better skills in their endeavors. In the first parts of the book, Malcolm explores the aspect of timing as incentives for success. A great example is successful people such as Bill Gates who were born in the fifties at a time when opportunities for computer technologies were slowly building in the eighties. He also explains the month of birth an example being the month of January. Some hockey players that have had great success in their games were born in the month of January. He uses this aspect of time to explain the factor of a cumulative advantage associated with people born early in the year. In hockey, the people born this early are characterized by being more physical, therefore, have a better chance of becoming more athletic, and thus they have more success in the game. This is an aspect is used to explain the availability of advantages which are responsible for the success of a person. This explanation also applies to another aspect of life whereby those with opportunities that already surround them have a better chance of success if they are capable of taking advantage of the opportunities and building upon them for success.

Malco0 also focuses on the aspect of cultural legacies either in the form of success or failure. Cultural legacies take many generations to build and influence people towards the cultural perception that are important for success. Some cultural legacies are characterized by success and as they are passed on from generation to generation so is the success accompanied by it. The same goes for cultural legacies associated with failure. The two main aspects put forward in the book is opportunity and legacy and are two aspects that bring out exceptional people from the society.

Exceptional people are those that are developed from successful cultural legacies and also have great opportunities around. He emphasizes on the 10000hours rule which he considered the time limit for an individual to have mastered success. This is a time spent perfecting ones own craft, specializing and learning more about it. Bill Gates and the Beatles are good examples of people who passed the 10000-hour rules and what came after was a great level of success that led to the development of exceptional; people.

Malcolm expresses his perception of success as a factor of inheritances and advantages that surround individuals. They for major factors for the development of exceptional people. They explore the aspect of self-determination cultural factors and opportunities already in existence. Advantages exist differently around people, and it may depend on the cultural perception of people to effectively utilize the opportunities around them. Cultural legacies influence the perception that people have of the world around them. The book is, therefore, an inspirational non-fiction that explores the factors of success. It provides perception as well as practical information to explain the influences of opportunity and cultural legacies as factors of success or failure.