Oftentimes the word “success” conjures up feelings of arduous work and exceptional natural ability, which Maxwell Gladwell's profoundly challenges in his complex novel, the Outliers. Gladwell argues that the heart of success stems from opportunities, and no real successful being is truly “self made”, for each successful entity had access to unique opportunities and advantages.

Take for example, the mammoth success story of Bill Gates. Indeed, he possessed the drive and motivation; however, his story goes beyond more than what meets the eye. His story, commonly recounted as the innate genius that simply dropped out of Harvard University, only to go on into the development of multi-millionaire Microsoft, earnestly requires more needed information for comprehension.

In truth, his brainy representation and outlook of pure “luck”, fails to pronounce the truth. In reality, by the time Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard Law, under his belt he possessed the skills for he had far- over 10,000 hours of practice with computer softwaring. Extremely unlikely for high schools and even elite collages, Gate’s privileged middle school put a timesharing system in place, crucial to computer programming, and each week he wound get 20 to 30 hours of practice in.

The constant practice, which became so new to the world, placed young Gate’s at a crucial advantage amongst his peers, which is what success becomes dependent on: advantages. The idea of advantages amid the educational system continues, when explicating the advantages Chinese students has, in comparison to American students. The Chinese language present major advantages, for the crisp and short pronunciation of the Chines number system, in relation towards the United State’s, allows the Chinese students to digest the problems in a faster manner.

Thus, with a faster ability to understand the mathematical problems, as a result of the faster pace that parallels to the language, allows for much higher standardized test scores for math portions than Ameriican students. The elements of true success commence with ambition and aims, however, the opportunities around entities become the heart of success.