outliers (speaker and audience)

     The target audience of the novel Outliers, written by Malcolm Gladwell, is both adults and adolescents from all backgrounds who would like to learn how to be successful in their own lives. The novel appeals to people from various backgrounds because it discusses how to be successful and identifies different opportunities the average person can take to reach their goals. His novel uses many stories from all over the world that show how people are successful and because he does not focus on a specific gender or ethnicity nearly everyone can find something to relate to.
    Malcolm Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England however he spent most of his childhood in rural Canada. Gladwell has stated that one of his major influences for writing was his mother,  however he  acknowledges that as a child his father allowed him to wander freely and experience the libraries at the university at which he worked. His father allowing him to do this most likely helped spark his interest in writing. Before he became an author,  Gladwell pursued a career in advertising. Ultimately he was not able to find employment in advertising so he pursued a career in journalism and landed a job at The American Senator in Indiana.
 After working at The American Senator , he began working at The New Yorker in 1996. Surprisingly,  when he started at  The New Yorker  he was assigned to write about fashion instead of academic research as he had initially intended. He had two major articles at The New Yorker,   titled “The Tipping Point” and “The Coolhunt” which inspired him to write his first book. Gladwell has written a total of five books that include: Outliers: The Story of Success, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. Aside from doing these accomplishments, Gladwell also hosts the podcast Revisionist History.
All of Gladwell's books tend to focus on social science topics such as sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Another theme of his that I noticed while reading Outliers, was that of perseverance. He often mentions the “10,000 hour rule” which states that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. I believe that this means to not give up on something if you are not good at it at first because it takes time to become good at anything.

Kaitlyn Schaper