The overall theme of the book is that successful human beings don’t rise up from nothing. There are many factors that play into being successful. We seem to believe that the successful were born with some quality or talent to help them be the way they are. The author states, “We want to know what they're like—what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what …show more content…
Gladwell uses both Mozart and The Beatles to prove that they are not so much musical geniuses, but they both worked in the musical industry and succeeded after 10,000 hours of work. Not only does time play an important part, but opportunity does as well. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, had many opportunities to use computer softwares at a young age. He also worked and studied for 10,000 hours before he began rising to the top which points us back to our theme. None of these people rose from dust and was able to rise to the top on their own, they had opportunities and time.
Talent and Luck on the other hand are not as important in reaching the top. Of course having talent is necessary, but it is not sufficient in being able to succeed. Not everyone has talent or even luck. In Gladwell’s book he mentions that because of the way a certain athletes birthday is, he’s able to rise to the top, but that's not the only thing helping him to get there. You can’t base success solely on talent and luck because you will inevitably never reach the top. Without opportunity and time, you can’t get very