The book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, was very interesting to me. The book describes how people seperate themselves from other people. He describes many things that start out as a slight advantage, and turn into huge advantages. Many of the things in this book connected to my life.
The first way this book connected to my life was when he talked about sports. In the book, Gladwell says, "The professional hockey player starts out a little better than his peers.And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger..." (30) I play baseball, and I have found this to be very true in sports. When I was cut from modified baseball in middle school, there were some kids on the team that I thought I was better than, or at least even with skill-wise. When the spring season started, those kids looked much better. The tryouts ended in March, and the spring baseball season starts in mid-April. That month and a half of extra practice made them a lot better, and their edge got bigger.
The second way this book connected to my life was the parenting styles of different families. In the book, Gladwell describes an experiment by Lareau, and he says, " the middle-class children learn a sense of 'entitlement' " (105). I am normally a quiet kid, but if there is something wrong, I feel comfortable speaking up and fixing the problem. I think this has a strong relationship with how my parents raised me. My parents may not have pushed me as hard as Alex Williams' parents did, " ...his mother and father- in the manner of educated families- have painstakingly taught them to him, nudging and prodding and encouraging and showing him the rules of the game..." (108), but they did push me to become more social and assert myself when something was wrong when I was little. This parenting style has caused me to be able to assert myself in a situation, and has helped me a lot in school and even at home.
The third way this book connected to my life was the part about academics and the chapter Rice Paddies and Math Tests. The part that I felt most connected to myself was the part about the Renee tape. When he is talking about why the Renee tape is Schoenfeld's favorite example, he says, " Twenty- two minutes pass from the moment Renee begins playing with the computer program to the moment she says, ' Ahhhh' " (245). This applies to my life, because when I was taking Integrated Algebra in 8th grade, I had a lot of assignments that were challenging to me. Instead of taking one look at the problem and giving up, I tried to look at the problem from the different perspective to help myself solve the problem. I personally have never spent up to twenty-two minutes on one problem, but I worked for a long time to solve one of these challenging problems. I think that this patience may be what allows me to excel in math. I received a 97% on the Regents exam that year, and I believe my patience played an important role in that. Gladwell supports this in the book, when he says, " What if coming from a culture shaped by the demands of growing rice also makes you better at math?" (232). When Gladwell says this, he means that the patience from growing rice leads to the patience in learning, which leads to better understanding. This is how the chapter Rice Paddies and Math Tests connects to my life.
This book makes many valid points, but these three examples are how the book best applies to my life. I thought this was a very interesting book, because not only does he connect all of the stories to one main point, but he uses all true stories. Gladwell put a lot of effort into researching and putting facts together for this story, and it shows in this book. Outliers does a great job of showing how people who are very good at things get to where they are, and uses many examples that people can relate to.
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