Media Stereotypes Essay -- Media Stereotypes Stereotyping

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Outliers by Malcom Gladwell Essay

In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, his goal is to convince the reader that â€Å"people don’t rise from nothing† and that â€Å" we do owe something to parentage and patronage. † Although certain people’s success requires prerequisites of talent and knowledge. I agree with Gladwell that it is not solely because of these talents that these people are successful. However, their success most often is dependant on one’s past good fortune. For example, when or where one was born and raised, one’s cultural background and family legacies, one’s schooling, and many other factors, create opportunities for success where these talents can be utilized. Although some people are thought to have risen from nothing or to have gone from rags to riches, the fact is no one is capable of creating their own success without the help of others and good fortunes along the way. In this passage, a point that Gladwell points out is that success can be created by parentage and patronage, hidden advantages and opportunities, cultural backgrounds and family legacies. An example of the importance of one’s cultural backgrounds and family influence is the way we are raised. Our parents, as our first teachers have a big role in who will become in our lives; they teach us how to interact with other people, how to act in certain situations and how to present ourselves to others. The different religious and cultural backgrounds of our parents, and also the way our parents were raised have an enormous impact on the way our parents raise us. As a parent, the balancing of strictness, pressure, giving, loving, helping, and withholding, among other factors can be difficult, with the question being what balance is the best to raise a child. Because we are all raised in different ways everyone has different views on how to raise a child based on their knowledge of how they were raised. This proves that the way we are raised can make the difference in our success. An example of how parentage and patronage play a role in one’s success is sometimes evident in schooling. Everyday people acquire things they may not deserve because of their family and who they may know. A very common example of this is the use of legacies for admission into a university. Students use their parental legacies at schools all the time and depending on the school this can have an impact on the student’s admission to the school. Another strategy applicants use to help their admission into a school is to search for someone to write their recommendation letter that will have the most amount of influence on the admissions office. Another example of how â€Å"whom you know† can make the difference in one’s success is when looking for jobs. If your aunt, father, grandfather or friend owns or works at a successful business and they help you get a job, sometimes right out of college even if you aren’t as qualified as someone else who wants the job. This way, you are getting an opportunity that you wouldn’t have had otherwise that could make the difference of your success. Therefore, everyday instances like using legacies to get into college, inquiring jobs because of nepitism, or even getting moved up to an honors class because your mom called the school can create success for our futures. In this excerpt from Malcom Gladwell’s The Outliers, Gladwell makes the point that success requires help from others and good fortune to get ahead and become successful. I think whether we realize it or not we are always using advantages we have to get ahead in our own lives, in order to set us up for a more successful future.

The Message of Gandhi - Gandhi Biography Examples

â€Å"Be the change you want to see in the world.† These famous words uttered by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi while leading India to independence serve as a peephole into the magnanimity that his life and work were. Raised in a Jain family, where non-violence and vegetarianism form the root of their philosophy, Gandhi was inspired since a young age in the ways of truth and benevolence. His faith was put to an early test when he first came face to face with the situation of Apartheid in South Africa where Indians living in the British colonies were denied basic rights and were subjected to inhumane practices. His ideologies now got a chance to be put in practice though, and for the first time, the world saw movements of non-violent resistance. In a way to promote the Indian human resource with the South African government, Gandhi mobilised the Indians to help the government in the war against natives, while consecutively coercing the army to take Indians into their force. He would call his efforts ‘experiments’ in way of harmony, but was forced to reconsider their effectiveness when he got to know the cause of the natives better during his time spent in South African jails. But the methods of rebellion that the natives took to in occasions such as the Zulu war, which Gandhi called ‘man-hunt, not war’, made him realise the inhumanity that co mes to existence in the name of war and rebellion (Bhana and Vahed 44). Wasting no time, he returned to India, with his now firmly formed methodologies of non-violent protests and satyagraha (truth as a force against tyranny) and dived head on into the on-going independence movement. Gandhi believed that if one person can be strong enough to speak the truth, to suffer adversity with the dignity and practice non-violence as a way of life, an entire nation can do the same as nations are, after all, made of people. His inherent faith in the human soul made him speak out on many occasions saying that if one has the courage to stand bare-chested and face the bullets coming his way, the adversary is bound to realise his own weakness in hiding behind arms and force. However, these views of Gandhi have reached extremities on occasions when he spoke out during the period of Holocaust, saying that the Jews shouldn’t have hidden and escaped from Hitler’s forces, but instead should have faced them with non-violent courage.  Ã¢â‚¬Å"The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany As it is they succumbed anyway in their mil lions,† he said. While no parallel can be drawn between the British treatment of colonised India and the Nazi treatment of Jews, Gandhi’s message was of renunciation of the violence that resides in the hearts of both the oppressor and the oppressed (Fischer 348). Gandhi’s legacy of truth and non-violence continued long after his assassination in 1948, through great leaders like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela and in popular writings including those of Romain Rolland and Albert Einstein. Obama owed his success as the first black president of America to Gandhi as well, â€Å"I am mindful that I might not be standing before you today, as President of the United States, had it not been for Gandhi and the message he shared with  America  and the world,† he said, addressing a joint session in the parliament of India. Gandhi’s message to an individual, any individual was simple, â€Å"Happiness is when what  you think,  what you say, and what  you do  are in  harmony.† Works Cited Bhana, Surendra and Vahed, Goolam, The Making of a Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa, 1893–1914.   New Delhi: Manohar 2005. Print. Fischer, Louis.  The life of Mahatma Gandhi. Harper 1950. Print.