DKMonroe

I’ve been wanting to read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, since I heard about it in June. Now I’m simply rabid for it thanks to the great review, written by David Leonhardt, that not only described what Malcolm is trying to say, but what it’s trying to imply:

“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.

Since President-Elect Obama is planning on doing exactly what Gladwell is urging (especially around education), it proves his point that sometimes it’s a matter of factors other than those that the individual posses. In other words, Gladwell’s book will be successful because it came out now rather than a decade ago.

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