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Gladwell on Success: It's About Luck

Journalist-guru's latest book is 'closest to his heart'

By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff

Posted Nov 10, 2008 1:49 PM CST

(Newser) – Journalist and pop guru Malcolm Gladwell brings other people's big ideas to the masses, and in that way, “I’m a parasite,” he says. In his new book, the author takes modesty to a new level, crediting his success—which, by the way, manifests itself in a $4 million advance for his latest book and $80,000 speaking fees—to circumstances outside his control. That goes for everyone else's, too. Success, he writes in Outliers, is as much about luck as it is talent, reports Jason Zengerie in New York magazine.

Gladwell analyzes a bunch of outliers—people who are spectacularly successful—for the circumstances that allowed them to excel. Take Bill Gates: He's obviously brilliant, Gladwell concludes, but a lot of similarly brilliant people didn't get the breaks he got as a kid, when he was exposed to computers long before he got to Harvard. This book, he says, is not about self-help, but social change. "The world decides what you can and can’t be. And the appropriate place to provide opportunities is at the world level, not the individual level.”

Malcolm Gladwell offers suggestions for realizing individual potential in his new book.
Malcolm Gladwell offers suggestions for realizing individual potential in his new book.   (Getty Images)
One Gladwell solution: Poorer students learn better than rich students during the year, but lose that knowledge in the summer. So cut summer vacation in inner-city schools.
One Gladwell solution: Poorer students learn better than rich students during the year, but lose that knowledge in the summer. So cut summer vacation in inner-city schools.   (Getty Images)
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By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard to try his hand at his own computer software company, he’d been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past 10,000 hours.
- Malcolm Gladwell

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COMMENTS
Showing 1 of 1 comment
Guest
Nov 10, 2008 1:53 AM CST
Very glad to hear he has a new book coming out. "Outliers: The Story of Success" will be released Nov. 18, 2008.

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