Well and Glad.

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gladwell, par for his course, remains preeminently readable and manages to assemble a pleasant, interesting book. But of his books, this one I liked the least. Perhaps too much Dunnett and Wiman make a simple sentence vaguely soporific; perhaps sleeping in my car in sub-zero weather leaves me less rested than I thought.

Either way, it was still a quick and pleasant little read. His thesis, simply (and far more pedantically) put, is that the miraculous stories of success of which we are aware are less miraculous than they seem. Maybe there was a sandbar, maybe mom did pack me a lunch, whatever. Rather than a miracle, a perfect sort of storm occurs, getting Bill Gates thousands of free hours on a computer when such a thing was unheard of, and getting Oppenheimer off of an attempted murder rap (yes, murder). Thus, when opportunity appears they are in the perfect position to grab the proverbially knocking hand and either take it off at the shoulder or drag the body in with it.

So the vast majority of professional Canadian hockey players are born toward the end of the Canadian hockey cut-off year: a kid that's seven years eleven months tends to be larger and stronger than a kid that's seven and a day, so he makes the team, gets the practice, gets sent to the camp, gets the extra practice, gets noticed by scouts, gets drafted, gets brain damage and ends up spending his fortune being fed soup through a straw; long live the Queen. The flurry of Jewish doctors and lawyers succeed because they were descended from the flurry of Jewish immigrants that had to work obscenely long and hard hours, passing the habit on to their children (who wiped the floor with the lazy earlier immigrants, like us), and many other circumstances, including Asian math skills of all things.

The magic behind success? 10,000 hours. Simple, straightforward. If you want to excel at anything, if you want to master anything, put in 10,000 hours. Or just marry aforementioned Jewish doctor or lawyer.

This book ends, however, with a rare, hushed, even sacred view of Gladwell's personal life—a touch that's absent his other analytical books, a touch that ushers the reader into the realm of confidant and Gladwell into the realm of human. So intimate a gesture intimates to me that when I part the covers of his next book, I'll probably sit back, light a pipe and greet an old friend whose conversation I've ever enjoyed, but one that I feel I'm finally getting to know.

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