TOW #13: Outliers - Chapter 5 & 6

Malcom Gladwell, a British-Canadian journalist and best-selling author, talks about how people do not succeed based on their ability and hustle, in chapter five. Rather, people succeed based on their origins of virtue. Intelligence and ambition are not enough and Gladwell supports his statement with the story of attorney Joseph Flom. According to Gladwell, Flom did not succeed based on his ambition and how qualified he was. He succeeded in part by being raised in a Jewish culture where hard work and ingenuity was encouraged. Chapter six talks about how a person's origin, their culture, makes a big impact on who they are in the present. Gladwell uses ethos to support this claim; psychological studies have shown that cultures based on honor, where reputation is regarded as the most important, are more aggressive in defending their culture. Such places with these honor-based culture are down south and in Asian countries. It seemed that Gladwell's purpose was to show that success is partisan, that it does favor those with a better background and is not always fair. He accomplished getting his purpose across with the use of two prominent rhetorical devices, anecdotes and ethos. Gladwell used an anecdote about the attorney, Joseph Flom and established ethos by citing psychological experiments that supported his claim. The audience members, followers of Malcom Gladwell's writing pieces as well as people interested in how success "works", are told that success is, in fact, bias. Though society tries to hide that fact, it cannot be ignored, and Gladwell does a good job of stating and narrating that claim.