Blog #4: Charline Wright-Gipson

The person I chose for this blog is Charline Wright-Gipson. Charline  was born in Kingston, Jamaica and moved to Toronto when she was 11. One winter Charline told her mother, "I'm leaving this country as soon as I can support myself." Charline started to apply into colleges, she got accepted into Cornell University.  Charline's  parents didn't know it was a good school and wanted her to stay in Toronto. Her family staged an "intervention" but Charline took a stand and said to her family, "None of you can tell me how to live because none of you have the life I want." Charline set a strict plan, go to college, go to law school, work for the top law firm, live in this city, make money. Charline achieved all of her goals and realized she was unfulfilled. Charline moved away from the craziness of New York, and took a less demanding job in New Orleans.

Charline's story relates to chapter 5 in the book Outliers, because Gladwell introduces Joe Flom a Jewish lawyer. Flom, grew up in a Jewish family during the great depression, did good in school, and eventually attended Harvard Law School without getting a college degree. Flom was kindly rejected from the Big New York Law Firm's during "hiring season" for being Jewish. Flom's proffesor tells him about other Jewish lawyers who were going through the same thing, and were going to open their own Law Firm. Flom and his now buisness partners started handling legal filing and taxes for big corporations. Between 1970 and 1980 there was a massive boom in the number of mergers and acquisitions and were worth a lot of money.  Flom's Law firm was the only one who had the experience and knew how to do it since they had done it for a long time. That's when the Big New York Law firm's wanted to hire Flom. I feel that the same thing happened with Charline, because she ended up moving to New Orleans and getting a less stressful job.