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Listen to Revisionist History, a podcast from Malcolm Gladwell and Panoply Media. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.

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For 3000 years, the story of David and Goliath has seeped into our cultural consciousness. This is generally how the tale is told: a young shepherd does battle with a giant warrior and, using nothing but a slingshot, comes out victorious. But is this really what the Bible describes? In today's talk, Malcolm Gladwell - [...]

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Some chewy food for thought this week on the Internets: The host of the blog Ask a Korean! responds to a chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers that links culture to frequency of plane crashes. (Watch an unrelated talk from Gladwell here.) Read the original post here and some updates here, which includes Gladwell's response to [...]

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We have all been there: standing in aisle five of the supermarket trying to decide which jar of mustard to buy. Do we go organic, or for the brand with whole mustard seeds? Or do we simply pick the one in the brightest yellow bottle? In a fascinating talk at TEDxStanford, "Sometimes it's good to [...]

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For 3000 years, the story of David and Goliath has seeped into our cultural consciousness. This is generally how the tale is told: a young shepherd does battle with a giant warrior and, using nothing but a slingshot, comes out victorious. But is this really what the Bible describes?

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The latest Tweets from Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell). Skinny Canadian. New York

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O utliers is at once Gladwell's least and most ambitious book. Unlike The Tipping Point and Blink, which took their counterintuitiveness to extremes, the conventional wisdom Gladwell seeks to demolish in Outliers isn't even really CW anymore. Is there anyone who still believes that "success is exclusively a matter of individual merit," which is how Gladwell describes his straw man? And yet, as Gladwell examines all the things other than individual merit—the "hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies"—that produce hockey stars and software billionaires and math geniuses, he builds a brief for a massive reorganization of social structures and institutions that will give people who don't have those advantages and opportunities and legacies an equal shot at success.

Consider, for instance, those hockey stars. Relying on the work of a Canadian psychologist who noticed that a disproportionate number of elite hockey players in his country were born in the first half of the year, Gladwell explains what academics call the relative-age effect, by which an initial advantage attributable to age gets turned into a more profound advantage over time. Because Canada's eligibility cutoff for junior hockey is January 1, Gladwell writes, "a boy who turns 10 on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn 10 until the end of the year." You can guess at that age, when the differences in physical maturity are so great, which one of those kids is going to make the league all-star team. Once on that all-star team, the January 2 kid starts practicing more, getting better coaching, and playing against tougher competition—so much so that by the time he's, say, 14, he's not just older than the kid with the December 30 birthday, he's better. The solution? Double the number of junior hockey leagues—some for kids born in the first half of the year, others for kids born in the second half. Or, to apply the principle to something a bit more consequential (to non-Canadians, at least), Gladwell suggests that elementary and middle schools put students with January through April birthdays in one class, the May through August birthdays in another, and those with September through December in a third, in order "to level the playing field for those who—through no fault of their own—have been dealt a big disadvantage."

"The book's saying, 'Great people aren't so great,' " Gladwell says. "Their own greatness is not the salient fact about them."

Or take the case of Bill Gates. Gladwell cites a body of research finding that the "magic number for true expertise" is 10,000 hours of practice. "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good," Gladwell writes. "It's the thing you do that makes you good." Gladwell shows how Gates accumulated his 10,000 hours while in middle and high school in Seattle thanks to a series of nine incredibly fortunate opportunities—ranging from the fact that his private school had a computer club with access to (and money for) a sophisticated computer, to his childhood home's proximity to the University of Washington, where he had access to an even more sophisticated computer. "By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own computer software company," Gladwell writes, "he'd been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past 10,000 hours." Yes, Gates is obviously brilliant, Gladwell concludes, but without the lucky breaks he had as a kid, he never could have had the opportunity to fulfill the true potential of that brilliance. How many similarly brilliant people never get that opportunity?

And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can't help noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries are willing to work longer and harder than their Western counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of rice. Turning to a historian who studies ancient Chinese peasant proverbs, Gladwell marvels at what Chinese rice farmers used to tell one another: "No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich." Contrast that legacy with the one derived from Western agriculture—which holds that some fields be left fallow rather than be cultivated 360 days a year and which, by extension, led to the creation of an education system that allowed students to be left fallow for periods, like summer vacation. For American students from wealthy homes, summer vacation isn't a problem; but, citing the research of a Johns Hopkins sociologist, Gladwell shows that it's a profound handicap for students from poor homes, who actually outlearn their rich counterparts during the school year but then fall behind them when school lets out. "For its poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem," Gladwell concludes. "It has a summer-vacation problem." So how to close the gap between rich and poor students? Get rid of summer vacation in inner-city schools.

Outliers is filled with those sorts of diagnoses and prescriptions. It's a book that celebrates the great man, then, as politely as possible, cuts him down to size. "I'm one of those people who started watching golf, even though I've never picked up a golf ball in my life, when Tiger Woods started winning, because he's just so extraordinarily compelling," Gladwell says. "There is something inherently interesting about exploring a topic through the lens of these people, these outlier types, who are off the charts. The book's saying, 'Great people aren't so great. Their own greatness is not the salient fact about them. It's the kind of fortunate mix of opportunities they've been given.' So I feel like, yeah, we know that, but we don't act on it, so that's why I think it's worth repeating, because it's one of those little truths that kind of dribbles away when it comes time for action."

As for determining that action, Outliers moves away from the animating spirit of Gladwell's previous books that led the New York Times to call him the "Dale Carnegie ... of the iPod generation." Gone, for the most part, are the cutesy buzzwords—there's no place for "mavens" and "connectors" and "salesmen" in Gladwell's story of success, and no amount of "thin-slicing" will help someone overcome relative-age disadvantage. "This is very specifically not a self-help book," Gladwell says. "It's a book that's very much about collective and social organized change. I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can't be whatever you want to be. 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." With his last book, Gladwell sought to eliminate the focus group; with this one, he wants to eradicate poverty.

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Malcolm Gladwell's elegant and wildly popular theoriesabout modern life have turned his name into an adjective-Gladwellian! But in his new book, he seeks to undercut the cult of success, including his own, by explaining how little control we have over it.

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So Bill Gates is introduced as a young computer programmer from Seattle whose brilliance and ambition outshine the brilliance and ambition of the thousands of other young programmers. But then Gladwell takes us back to Seattle, and we discover that Gates's high school happened to have a computer club when almost no other high schools did. He then lucked into the opportunity to use the computers at the University of Washington, for hours on end. By the time he turned 20, he had spent well more than 10,000 hours as a programmer.

At the end of this revisionist tale, Gladwell asks Gates himself how many other teenagers in the world had as much experience as he had by the early 1970s. "If there were 50 in the world, I'd be stunned," Gates says. "I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events." Gates's talent and drive were surely unusual. But Gladwell suggests that his opportunities may have been even more so.

Many people, I think, have an instinctual understanding of this idea (even if Gladwell, in the interest of setting his thesis against conventional wisdom, doesn't say so). That's why parents spend so much time worrying about what school their child attends. They don't really believe the child is so infused with greatness that he or she can overcome a bad school, or even an average one. And yet when they look back years later on their child's success - or their own - they tend toward explanations that focus on the individual. Devastatingly, if cheerfully, Gladwell exposes the flaws in these success stories we tell ourselves.

The book's first chapter explores the anomaly of hockey players' birthdays. In many of the best leagues in the world, amateur or professional, roughly 40 percent of the players were born in January, February or March, while only 10 percent were born in October, November or December. It's a profoundly strange pattern, with a simple explanation. The cutoff birth date for many youth hockey leagues is Jan. 1. So the children born in the first three months of the year are just a little older, bigger and stronger than their peers. These older children are then funneled into all-star teams that offer the best, most intense training. By the time they become teenagers, their random initial advantage has turned into a real one.

At the championship game of the top Canadian junior league, Gladwell interviews the father of one player born on Jan. 4. More than half of the players on his team - the Medicine Hat Tigers - were born in January, February or March. But when Gladwell asks the father to explain his son's success, the calendar has nothing to do with it. He instead mentions passion, talent and hard work - before adding, as an aside, that the boy was always big for his age. Just imagine, Gladwell writes, if Canada created another youth hockey league for children born in the second half of the year. It would one day find itself with twice as many great hockey players.

"Outliers" has much in common with Gladwell's earlier work. It is a pleasure to read and leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward. It also, unfortunately, avoids grappling in a few instances with research that casts doubt on those theories. (Gladwell argues that relatively older children excel not only at hockey but also in the classroom. The research on this issue, however, is decidedly mixed.) This is a particular shame, because it would be a delight to watch someone of his intellect and clarity make sense of seemingly conflicting claims.

For all these similarities, though, "Outliers" represents a new kind of book for Gladwell. "The Tipping Point" and "Blink," his second book, were a mixture of social psychology, marketing and even a bit of self-help. "Outliers" is far more political. It is almost a manifesto. "We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that 13-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur," he writes at the end. "But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one 13-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?"

After a decade - and, really, a generation - in which this country has done fairly little to build up the institutions that can foster success, Gladwell is urging us to rethink. Once again, his timing may prove to be pretty good.

OUTLIERS

The Story of Success.

By Malcolm Gladwell.

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Book Review | 'Outliers: The Story of Success,' by Malcolm Gladwell

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So Bill Gates is introduced as a young computer programmer from Seattle whose brilliance and ambition outshine the brilliance and ambition of the thousands of other young programmers. But then Gladwell takes us back to Seattle, and we discover that Gates's high school happened to have a computer club when almost no other high schools did.

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Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell Animated Book Review

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Do you think that Paul McCartney and John Lennon are geniuses? Think again. According to Malcolm Gladwell, they're primarily just hard workers, who played together so often in the early part of their careers that they couldn't be anything but successful.

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Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce | Malcolm Gladwell

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Many say a quota of 10,000 hours of intellectual practice in your field is necessary to obtain the status of "expert." Mozart did not produce any works that stood the test of time until he was around 21-years-old (once he already hit his 10,000 hours).

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THE SMARTEST MAN IN THE WORLD WHO NEVER ACHIEVED SUCCESS

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THE SMARTEST MAN IN THE WORLD WHO NEVER ACHIEVED SUCCESS

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THE ONLY WAY TO UNDERSTAND SUCCESS IS TO PUT CHARACTERS IN CONTEXT

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THE ONLY WAY TO UNDERSTAND SUCCESS IS TO PUT CHARACTERS IN CONTEXT