How to "unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't"
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In reviews of Malcolm Gladwell's previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink, I express an opinion that Gladwell offers an insight that others have previously expressed and then requires 300+ pages to discuss it. His key points in both books could have been made in an article. Gladwell's "tipping point"(2002), for example, is essentially the same as Michael Kami's "trigger point" (1988) and Andrew Gove "inflection point" (1996). (Gladwell does acknowledge the importance of an article, "Broken Windows," co-authored by James Wilson and George Kelling for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982). When I began to read Outliers, therefore, I feared that Gladwell would once again offer a thoughtful but verbose examination of a by-now familiar insight: success requires more than extraordinary talent.
That said, Outliers is (in my opinion) his most significant and most valuable book thus far. As the Epilogue clearly indicates, this is also his most personal book. In it, Gladwell demonstrates superior storyteller skills as he discusses several quite different situations that demonstrate that "the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are...[Those who succeed] owe something to parentage and patronage. [They] may look like they did all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot...It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are [begin italics] from [end italics] that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."
Gladwell provides many different versions of "the story of success" involving those who demonstrate what sociologists call "accumulative advantage." For example, in any youth sports competition (especially hockey) that groups players according to the calendar year of birth, those who are born in January, February, or March are more likely to be bigger, better coordinated, and more talented because of "the phenomenon of relative age." They will play more often, receive more individual attention, and be selected to play on better teams because they were born closest to the cut-off date. Their success follows a predictable course. "Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them." Clearly, Gladwell agrees with Geoff Colvin that "talent is overrated." As does Colvin, he cites The 10,000-Hour Rule and 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. And what's more, the people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, [begin italics] much [end italics] harder."
John Maxwell makes the same point in Talent Is Never Enough. If it were, "then the most effective and influential people would always be the most talented ones but that is often not the case...Clearly talent isn't everything." That said, he hastens to add, talent is worthy of our admiration and must be perceived in the proper perspective. Maxwell's key point is that all of us have a choice, actually several choices, and can determine to what extent (if any) we take full advantage of the talents we have, such as they are. "If you do, you will add value to yourself, add value to others, and accomplish much more than you dreamed was possible." Gladwell agrees but would presumably stress, also, the importance of others (family members, teachers, coaches, clergy, patrons, and mentors) to being able to commit 10,000 hours, "the magic number of greatness," to (Colvin's term) "deliberate practice." The success of the various outliers whom Gladwell discusses is not exceptional or mysterious. "It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."
NOT all it's cracked up to be
Customer Rating: 
I'd give this a single star, but the creativity of the subject is enough to warrant at least two stars. Plus everyone seems to discount one-stars as vendetta reviews.
In fact, I should have listened to the 9 page one-star review that I read before buying this book for my Kindle. It is NOT worth it.
90% fluff, and the ideas themselves are weak at best.
The best chapter is the aircraft accident dissection, but even that is not related to the topic of the book, it is a "distributed cognition" subject - something better left for another book altogether. Oh wait, that has already been written, Professor Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild"
Save your time and money (I'm even going to get my $10 back from Amazon).
