Success is the Disease of Me: Gladwell's Response

The quote, “success is the disease of me,” actually comes from Mindset by Carol Dweck, not from Outliers. It’s hard to say whether or not Gladwell would agree with this statement or not. Throughout his book, he mostly talks about how people become successful, but he never really talks about how they reacted when they reached their goal. However, Gladwell’s writing hints towards a negative response to this quote.

            

In his book Gladwell talks about many different ways people can become outliers, which, in this book means successful. He first talks about the Matthew Effect. This is basically about people are blessed with an early success, and because of that early success they are given more opportunities to improve themselves. An example Gladwell mentions is hockey players. A study was done that showed how a lot of the professional hockey players are born in the early months of the year: January, February, and March. This is because the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1^st. As a result, the children born in the early months are a lot more mature, and therefore better hockey players than the kids who were born later on in the year. Since those kids were better, they were put onto all star teams which allowed them to have better coaches, better teammates, and they were able to play much more games per year. This is all very interesting, but what happened once those players became very successful? Do they use that as a reason to keep trying? Or do they start to feel the pressure and start to lose confidence? Gladwell never addresses any of these issues, so it is unclear how he would feel about success at this point.

            

However, later on in the book, Gladwell starts to talk about a man named Chris Langdon. He first talks about how smart he is. He talks about his IQ, a game show trivia game he won, and many other things to attribute his extreme intelligence. But then Gladwell goes on to explain why he fails. He makes the point that IQ isn’t everything and that people must possess other skills in order to be successful. When he talks about Langdon’s failure, it almost seems as though he is looking down on him because he wasn’t able to succeed. It also seems like Gladwell thinks Chris Langdon’s life is already over; that just because he didn’t finish college, he cannot succeed in life. By using all this information, and by analyzing Gladwell’s writing style, it is obvious that he cares a lot about success, and I do not think he believes the quote, “success is the disease of me.” In fact, it seems that Gladwell sees success as a reward for taking advantages of talent and opportunity, not a disease that will ruin your life.

            

Moreover, I believe Gladwell disagrees with Carol Dweck’s quote. He thinks of success as more of an end point after putting forth a lot of time and effort, therefore being a rewarding outcome. If he would observe the lives of people who have had success, he might take on a different opinion. But right now it seems like Gladwell views success as nothing but a positive experience.