Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell are a collection of true stories that together help to explain the different ways that make people successful in their own lives. The book follows multiple stories of successful people like Bill Gates and The Beatles. He explains in detail how, while it seems that these people simply rose to success, there were actually a lot of opportunities that these people took advantage of that helped their rise to success.
Another part of Outliers that applies to my life is the “concerted cultivation” that sociologist Annette Lareau. Concerted cultivation is “…an attempt to actively ‘foster and asses a child’s talents, opinions, and skills.’” (104). My sister and I have been in multiple activities and camps since we were little. My mom was the leader of both of our Girl Scout troops and we both played recreation soccer and softball. As our interests changed, so did the activities we were in. My sister stopped playing soccer in third grade and only played softball, while I didn’t stop playing soccer until seventh grade. When I got to fourth grade I started playing the clarinet and was also in chorus. When my sister got to fourth grade she started playing the saxophone, and my parents bought each of us our own instruments, (instead of renting them) even though neither of them had played instruments when they were in school. At the beginning of ninth grade I even started private lessons for clarinet once a week for a half hour. In middle school I was a part of select band and when my sister got to the middle school she joined Jazz Band, Stage Band, and Select Band (the sax is a more versatile instrument than the clarinet) all of which go to Agawam, M.A. every year, where my mom was a chaperone every year. Between my sister and me, we will have gone 4 times in May (we both went one year and I didn’t join select band until seventh grade). My sister is also a part of Future Cities (a club at the middle school that builds a future city and is entered in a contest with other local schools) which last year won first at the competition they went to. Future Cities meets two- three times a week and normally goes from 3:30 until 5:30, meaning my parents have to pick her up from school multiple times a week, but they do. Another part of the concerted cultivation brought up by Lareau’s study was the fact that middle class families teach their children how to talk to authority; “The middle class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority.” (103) My parents expect that if my sister and I, for example, have a problem with a teacher, that we go talk to them ourselves that way we learn how to speak for ourselves.
In another section of Outliers, Gladwell goes back to the differences between richer and poorer families and summer vacation. Gladwell says the gap between reading scores for lower, middle and upper class kids from first to fifth grade “…is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn when they are not in school.” (258) Over summer vacations my sister and I were able to attend camps that we wanted to. Over my summers I have been to multiple volleyball camps, camps through the town like softball, field hockey, soccer, and “Games Galore”. This past summer I also went to a writing camp at U Albany and was a JVC (like a CIT) at Tawasentha for two weeks. My sister has been to multiple science camps and arts and crafts camps. Both of us went to sleep-away Girl Scout camps when we were younger, too. In addition, both of my parents love to read. My sister and I were also raised to love books, so our reading scores were, like the children in the study, higher than other kids our age because of how much we read.
Outliers shows how different opportunities and circumstances affect a person and the way that their life plays out. The opportunities and lessons in my life so far; work ethic, concerted cultivation, and academic engagement during the summer vacation, have all helped me to achieve what I have so far including being in honors classes like this one. The stories and lessons in Outliers can apply to everyone’s lives, whether it is taken as a good thing or not.
