Iraira Butcher: The Come Up
According to Malcolm Gladwell, an outlier is a person who is so successful in their field of expertise that they create a whole new definition of success. They are so successful that they become superior to any other person in their field of expertise, or in my case, in their family.
My mom, Iraira Butcher, was able to become the first doctor in a family of about sixty people.
According to Malcolm Gladwell, in order to succeed in a field of study, an outlier needs to have had some type of defining moment in their life. The types of defining moments that I have chosen to prove that my mom is truly an outlier are migration, education, and the 10,000-hour rule.
Migration
When a defining moment in an outlier's life is migration, it is because they have experienced a rise in opportunities and/or quality of life because they migrated to a different country.
Even so, the largest indication that migration was a defining moment in their life is when it is clear that their life would have been completely different if they hadn't migrated to that country.
Moving to New York
In her life, my mom migrated once. However, the defining moment was when my grandparents, both Panamanian, moved to the United States to find a better life for their family.
Years later, they had children, making my mom a second-generation immigrant. Being born in the United States created more opportunities for my mom because she was presented with a higher quality of education.
This led her to be exposed to different ideals and knowledge, which then led her to have a self-fulfilling prophecy at a very young age. She had always known that she was going to become a doctor and move out of public housing in Flatbush.
Now, all she needed to know was what kind of doctor.
Moving to Panama
As my mom grew older, she graduated from Virginia State University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and started experiencing the struggles of being a lower-class Black woman in the United States.
Sure, she had graduated college, but she wanted more. She wanted to become a doctor, in clinical psychology to be exact.
When my mom had me, things started to get harder because the money in the house was starting to become scarce. Raising a child in Brooklyn, New York, is no easy task.
While still holding on to her dream, my mom decided to get married to my dad and move to the Republic of Panama.
There she was able to:
Get her doctorate degree.
Provide me with elite opportunities.
Start a successful business.
Help people along the way.
Start studying to become the only Black female psychoanalyst in Panama.
Education
Knowing that education can have various impacts on people’s lives, Malcolm Gladwell divided this defining moment into segments. Some of them being courses, universities, scholarships, and attitudes toward education.
Education is a defining moment for my mom, not because she got good grades, but because she had a purpose and overall a great attitude toward education.
Seeing as my mom had three siblings and lived in public housing, there was not enough money going around to afford a private school. Even though my mom went to public school, she always enjoyed it more than the average student.
She used practical intelligence to get through growing up in rough neighborhoods, understanding that a good education was the only thing that was going to get her out of there. She wanted out as soon as possible.
Because of her never-ending drive, my mom attended extra classes, even when she was doing exceptionally well and didn’t need them, just to gain extra knowledge.
My mom’s learning paradigm led her to stay focused and use rejection as fuel to propel herself into the powerful greatness that she is now.
The 10,000-Hour Rule
According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours of intense training for someone to achieve complete mastery in their field of study.
In one of his analyses, he said, “Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it” (Gladwell, 2008).
Even though 10,000 hours of intense training seems quite harsh, my mom was able to pass them by a lot.
Elementary and High School
For my mom, being an exceptional student didn’t only mean being at the top of the class; it also meant working overtime.
During summer break, she would go to summer school just because she enjoyed going to school and learning. When she got into high school, she started going to night school too, just because she enjoyed it.
It got to the point where my mom had so much extra credit that she was exempt from all work during the last month of her senior year.
During and After College
While at Virginia State University, my mom didn’t have a friend group of people who were just as focused as her, which led her to slip up once or twice.
However, she quickly realized that she had to prioritize herself and got back on track. She graduated with high marks, while some of her friends didn’t even finish.
After she graduated from VSU, she moved back to New York to start her career. Her journey to become Dr. Iraira Butcher led her to provide services in places including:
A family center.
A domestic violence center.
A children’s domestic violence center.
There she gathered enough knowledge to get her where she wanted to go: Panama.
Training in Panama
Studying in Panama was going to be way harder than my mom thought because even though she was fluent in Spanish, she still had to learn how to speak the Spanish used in the analytic community.
After a rough patch, my mom, the only English speaker and only Black woman, graduated first and at the top of her class.
This proved to everyone that she had the innate ability to become a master psychologist. She did so well on her final dissertation that her work was published in the university’s library.
Conclusion
My mom, Iraira Butcher, is an outlier because she fits three of the defining moments that Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
She is a second-generation immigrant who was presented with great opportunities, and she worked hard to take advantage of them. Mastering the field of psychology in both the United States and Panama led her to become a successful business owner.
Because my mom is so successful, she is able to give me even greater opportunities than the ones she had. I am able to travel the world and become educated in the ways of life, and most importantly, I am able to pursue my dream in the entertainment business.
If my mom had not made the decision to move to Panama in 2011, I would not have all the opportunities that I have now, and my mom would not be a doctor.
Works Cited
Gladwell, Malcolm, 1963- author. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
