December 8, 2008 
In case you don’t know Malcolm Gladwell, he is the author of Blink and The Tipping Point. He has now published Outliers. Here is an interview of him about Outliers.
You can also see him in an older video presenting at TED.
It is worth reading his books and understanding his principles. I have seen him present live once. He was very good.
One thing about Outliers that I think is a key point is that Malcolm talks about outliers as being people who have put in 10,000 hours on something. The Beetles spent 10,000 hours playing. Gates spent 10,000 hours doing computer programming. Malcolm has spent more than 10,000 hours writing.
In a quote from him in a USA Today article, Malcolm says “the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work.”
Thank you for sharing. I just started reading Outliers recently and I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Blink’ and the ‘Tipping Point.’ Great author. Good reads.