The outliers I heard about growing up include Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. These people, just like any other highly successful person, work harder than anyone else to get where they are. Furthermore, they are willing to fail, because they know that to succeed they must learn from their failures. Clearly, to be very successful, a person must have that burning passion for what they do, they must do more than what is required, and they must be talented. Talent alone is not enough to become the world's next billionaire. Becoming an outlier requires talent, preparation, opportunity, and connections. In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell shows how important luck and opportunity are to being talented. Gladwell emphasizes throughout the book that one of the keys to success is being born at the right time. When Gladwell talks about the world's seventy-five richest people of all time, he notes, "Of the seventy-five names, a surprising fourteen are Americans born within nine years of each other in the mid-nineteenth century" (Gladwell 61). This was a very interesting observation for me. All those fourteen people were extremely lucky to have been born at that time. They were born in a perfect time period, just as the American economy began to prosper and industrial production became more important than ever. Being born during that time, those fourteen people took advantage of the immense opportunities and paths available to them. This example is the epitome of how important opportunity and luck are. If opportunities or possibilities are not provided that could change a person's life if they take advantage of them, success will be unattainable. Timely......middle of paper......so bad I thought my parents were mistreating me. In fact, compared to the rest of the world, people might think that people like me are spoiled. I have a much greater advantage to succeed in the world than my pen pal because I have my parents who help me every day and I am given numerous opportunities to learn more and move on to the next level. We usually consider these anomalies to be outliers, but people like many East Cobb children, we too are considered outliers. We have many more opportunities to succeed, we are born into the right family in the right place, and we learn many vital skills that many children never learn. Outliers has given me a new perspective on success and makes me feel grateful for who I am and those around me. Works Cited Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The success story. New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2008.Print.