Wes Moore revisions
Joseph Carr
English-095
Daniel Scarpa
May 4, 2016
Wes Moore Comparison
The Power of Habit is much more relevant in comparison to Outliers when reading The Other Wes Moore. Just the fact that both lives started out very similarly in the same area yet came out completely differently is a point. Outliers indicates most of this is do to luck but I would say it has more to do with habit. Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit is much more relative to there circumstances on why things turned out the way they did for these men.
The Wes Moore who is the author seems to be in a fairly stable home until his father passes since both parents care about him. The mother, Joy,  instills support for him even when his father passes and is there for him as much as she can. When Joy realizes she can’t discipline Wes on her own anymore since he is older and more mature, she sends him off to military school. This shows she will do whatever it takes to keep her son out of trouble, and keep him on the straight and narrow path to success and out of the hood.
Unfortunately, the other Wes Moore is not so lucky. His mom is not a bad person, she is
just trying to get a degree so there’s no time to enforce  good clean habits to keep her son out of
trouble. She also has no help from a drunk boyfriend the other Wes Moore calls father who is
either drunk,  high, or both, to even remotely care about his own son. This is one of the main reasons the other Wes ends up like the way he is, there is no strong support system for him, he is basically on his own.
	Unlike the author who has support from a stern mother who is always willing and takes action by disciplining him. Wes’s mother Mary doesn’t in a lot of ways.She believed Wes when he says he is Djing, when clearly he is a drug dealer like how Tony calls him out on it.. As seen in chapter four when tony his brother calls her out on the subject, “ Are you serious? You really believe that? Are you blind?”(Moore, 71). He doesn’t have any support from anyone. His father is a failure, his mother clearly doesn’t care about him enough to set him straight. The only one who checks him is his brother Tony who is involved in selling drugs himself yet determines after a certain point that its Wes’s decision. Now the authors mother would never just give in to letting her son do illegal things that could and probably would land him in a jail cell.
	The author Wes grew up in a neighborhood with similar experiences and problems. Thankfully neither of his parents were addicts with addictive cravings described in Duhigg’s book. He had structure in at least his home life. Even if it was just his mother. She worked multiple jobs to put him through military school when it got to the point she couldn’t handle him anymore as seen in chapter five after he punched his sister, “She was devastated.” “She was losing her son, and she was not sure how to turn the tide.”(Moore, 89). Both lived in very similar environments surrounded by the same thing, but one had endless love and support unlike the other.
	The Power of Habit gives us reasons and science to why people do what they do. Why is Wes a drug dealer, it is because of the habit loop in my opinion. His cue is that he needs money. So what does his brother do? He sells drugs. Wes decides that’s what he does to make money because that’s all he knows. This is at a very young age as well. His routine is to sell what most people at this time and area are addicted to which is crack. His reward is making money or what they would call “sneaker money”. It’s a vicious cycle where all he wants to do is make money. Especially when your good at like Wes was. In chapter six, “ Wes had the entire operation organized with precision of a military unit or a Fortune 500 company.” (Moore, 111). When your that good and you’ve been doing it for most of his life it can be very addictive. Plus when you sell with your crew that’s his family, they support him. They’ve always got his back. How can you leave your family? You don’t. This wasn’t just luck like the Outliers says is the major reason he’s like this. It’s his habit. “ Wes managed his team extremely well.” (Moore, 111). Also Wes was the leader of his drug ring. Its not like he can just leave, it would probably crumble. It was the only thing he knew.
	According to Outliers and other sources the odds were against the author. The Matthew effect which is a passage from the bible says “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” (Gladwell, 1). This is a major reason why I disagree with his statement because the author Wes grew up in the same  place the other Wes did, but with a constant support system (Joy) who was there for him. Statistically the odds were stacked against him, there is no way he should have made it out of there and became successful like he did.
	Since his mother disciplined him so much in his younger years there was no way for him to develop habits as bad as the other Wes. His cue would be to go to school. Lived out his daily life like a regular kid, nothing really special. Routine would fall under listening to his mother and doing the right thing. His reward would be later on in his life by becoming a military veteran and an accomplished author.
	Now what kept him on this path was his mom. If he strayed from it his mother was going to not just say something like Mary might have but to actually take action. She would smack him around a little. “ My mother had Thomas hands, a tag derived from her maiden name: hands that hit so hard you had to be hit only once to know you never wanted to be hit again.”(Moore, 5 and 6). Now Outliers makes the argument that if he didn’t have such support in his life he would have never turned out the way he did and would’ve ended up similar to Wes since they grew up in the same area around similar people. Statistics may show this. In all honesty do we really know that? We don’t know what could have happened.. There’s just to many variables to say if he never grew up the way he did he would’ve ended up in the same position as the other Wes.
	In the end The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg gives deeper meaning than Outliers by Malcom Gladwell to this story of both of these men’s lives. Duhigg in my opinion uses more fact based references than Gladwell’s statistically based references on luck. Not that Gladwell is not right, I just believe there is more to it than Demographic luck. It all comes down to how the individual works and how their habits are formed from there day to day life experiences.