Malcolm Gladwell has made himself a favourite of mine.  After reading "The Tipping Point" and "Blink!", and reviewing them here, when I found a copy of "Outliers" in a Wal-Mart while doing some Christmas shopping a few months ago, I had to pick it up.It is merely the realities of being a father of two and a law student that have prevented me from finishing it, and telling you about it, until today.Here, Gladwell takes his characteristic style of combining social and cognitive science with compelling story-telling, and turns it to a more traditional object.  "The Tipping Point" dealt with the idea of what makes an idea spread among people.  "Blink" dealt with the power of the unconcious mind.  "Outliers" has a more traditional idea at its core:  Outliers - those people who seem to achieve so much more than everyone else - are not self-made.  They are the result of two things: opportunity, and perseverance.Now, it's not surprising to anyone that you need opportunity, and you need to take advantage of it in order to succeed.  But Gladwell convincingly pushes this idea to its extreme.  Not only do you need opportunity and perseverance, but you need pretty much nothing else.  For instance, you do not need talent.  Why?  Because there is no such thing as talent.  There is only practice.  Which requires only opportunity and perseverance.And opportunity can take strange forms.  Your birthdate, your ethnicity, your birthplace, the sort of work your parents do, your culture, all these things can have profound and post-dictable (hard to know about in advance, but after the fact you can see the relationship) effects on your success.  Your parents can also have profound effects on you through their parenting style, but those effects are much more likely to be cultural than intentional, and typically relate directly to getting you opportunities, and teaching (or imposing) perseverance.  In particular, he focuses on the teaching by demonstration of the value of meaningful work: anything complex, autonomous, and rewarding (where reward and effort are related).The second main theme of the book is the idea of cultural legacies.  This is the idea that a significant part of who and what you are is determined by things that happened and circumstances that existed generations ago.  These legacies are long lasting, powerful, and ambivalent.  They may be valuable to you, they may be destructive.By way of a subjective review, this is not my favourite of Gladwell's books, merely because what is surprising here is not the conclusion, but the reasons.  At the same time, it is compelling, and it is political, which is different for Gladwell.  He is saying, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that you do not get what you deserve in this world.  Successful people do not, in any moral sense, deserve their success more than other people might.  Which means that if you believe that people should get what they deserve, you need to decide what you think people deserve.  And if your answer to that is "an equal opportunity to succeed," there is a lot of work to be done.On a more personal note, when he talks about the impact of your parents' culture, your own age, your location, I can't help but draw parallels to my own life.  I have a great deal of family.  My father had 11 siblings, and my mother 8.  Most of those aunts and uncles had multiple children, and some of those cousins now have children, too.  I'm pretty sure some of my cousins' children have children.  So my family is massive.  But the vast majority of it is in Ireland.  So my parents developed a network of friends in their new home.  Out of four or five families in that network that had their kids here, each with three or four children, all within a few years of each other, there are three of us who have now finished or are finishing law school. Almost 25%.  I don't know how that compares to the rest of my family in Ireland.  I can say that I'm not aware of any of my family in Ireland having more than one post-secondary degree.Now, I like to think I'm smart.  But Gladwell would suggest that there is something about being born in the late 70s / early 80s to parents who emigrated from Ireland to Alberta in the mid-1970s with a trade.  Something that gives you the opportunity and the attitude necessary to succeed in that particular way.If you find that suggestion ridiculous, but you enjoy having your mind opened to new possibilities, you should read Outliers.