From 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
He has a knack for upending conventional views, in prose more like a novelist's than a researcher's. In his runaway bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell showed how ideas and products catch fire; in Blink, he explained why gut decisions are often better than well-thought-out responses. In his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown), Gladwell probes what separates the highly successful from everyone else. How did the Beatles become the greatest rock band of all time? What makes Bill Gates so extraordinary? "I've always been drawn to those who are exceptional or weird in some way," he says, "and the book is about people whose achievement exceeds every expectation."
What matters: Talent, yes. Timing and opportunity—crucial. And not surprisingly, good old-fashioned hard work and discipline. "What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve," he says.
Gladwell himself is intimate with hard work and discipline. He grew up in rural Elmira, Canada, a place best known for its maple syrup festival. When his dad, a civil engineering professor, refused to drive young Malcolm 20 miles each morning to swim practice, the boy turned to running and became a high school champion. "Sometimes constraints actually create success," Gladwell says. "Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer."
RD: You write that talent and IQ don't matter as much as we think they do. What do we really need to become successful?
Gladwell: An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience. Bill Gates is successful largely because he had the good fortune to attend a school that gave him the opportunity to spend an enormous amount of time programming computers-more than 10,000 hours, in fact, before he ever started his own company. He was also born at a time when that experience was extremely rare, which set him apart. The Beatles had a musical gift, but what made them the Beatles was a random invitation to play in Hamburg, Germany, where they performed live as much as five hours a night, seven days a week. That early opportunity for practice made them shine. Talented? Absolutely. But they also simply put in more hours than anyone else.
RD: How does a kid become the next Bill Gates or Tiger Woods?
Gladwell: Both of these men had parents who allowed their children to focus almost exclusively on what brought them joy and what they were good at. And both of them were able, as children, to invest an extraordinary amount of time in pursuing that particular passion. Again, not just a little time. The magic number for them, for Mozart, and for so many outliers, as I call them, appears to be 10,000 hours.
Advertisement 
